Experimental Quadcopter by NickGoumas

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

Parts for a quadcopter I've been slowly building, breaking and upgrading. As I upload parts I'll try to keep things organized by increasing the version number at the end of the filename. Included will be stl files as well as SolidWorks part files. (SolidWorks2016)
Assembly:
The parts are stacked from bottom to top as follows. Battery-cradle, base-plate, motor-arms, vib-plate-bottom, top-cover. The stack is held together with 6-32 socket head cap screws inserted from the top down. I'd recommend using nylon lock nuts to secure everything. My power distribution board was too thick to squeeze between the base plate and the vib-plate-bottom so I put spacers between the vib-plate-bottom and the motor-arms. (#6 x 1/8" if I remember correctly)
I'll add notes for individual files below.
Battery Cradle:
V1 has four holes going out at compound angles. These accept four pieces of carbon fiber tube. At the time I was still a pretty novice pilot so I later moved the legs from the cradle to the motor arms to increase the footprint a bit. V2 was a simplified cradle that printed faster and was lighter. I'm using a Reaction 3S 5000mAh battery.
Motor Arm:
V1 works but everything is very exposed. V2 allows the ESC to be zip-tied underneath. The motor is also recessed and protected with side rails.
Vibration Plate:
The vibration plate is designed to use vibration ball isolaters found on amazon. I'm using a Pixhawk flight controller attached to the top plate with 3M foam tape.
Base Plate:
The base plate is cut out of Garolite (G-10) using an XCarve CNC router.
Top Cover:
At first I flew without a cover over the flight controller which was risky. V1 of the top cover is a thinned out battery cradle. This worked well to protect the flight controller and give me a platform on top to strap a GoPro. In windy environments I was worried the GoPro up on top was acting like a sail so I designed V2 to smooth out the copters cross-sectional area. It's a cool idea but there are a couple tweaks I need to fix on it. The diameter needs to be reduced slightly, my 10" props were coming to within maybe 20 thou of the dome. During landing they would barely touch and induce a lot of vibration. Another tweak is to add a hole so I can see the status light of the Pixhawk and four more holes to get to the assembly screws.
Dec-09-2016 - Uploaded new rev of the top cover, V3. This version has a slightly reduced diameter to keep the props from grazing it on landing. Added holes for the other four assembly screws as well as one for the indicator led. Moved the GPS wire pass-through to the correct side for the 3DR gps unit, previously it was towards the front.