Drone Project

After graduation, I had some time over the summer to take on a project that I've always wanted to do in University. I thought "how difficult is it to make a drone?" and so I decided to try to make a cool looking drone. I started off by buying a JJRC H31 drone which was going for $14 on ebay, dismantling it and taking out all the necessary components.

I had the idea of having the basic shape based off a teardrop/ foil because that would give the least drag force horizontally. Then I was thinking of other shapes and interesting objects that would give me inspiration for the design. I stumbled upon a post about sharks on facebook and I had the idea to do some quick research about the coefficient of drag for different marine animals. I came across an article in researchgate.net regarding research inspired by marine animals, shown below.

Muratoglu, Abdullah & Yuce, Mehmet & Eşit, Musa. (2016). "Foil Generation Inspiring from Nature"

Based on the research paper I decided to base my design off of a shark foil. I started off using a free software called OpenSCAD, a 3D-compiler that reads in a script file that describes the object and renders the 3D model from this script file.

A sample of the script is shown above, the sample does not contain all the parts that make up the 3D rendering.

It took too long to create the prototype using this form of CAD, so I had to download Creo Parametric 3.0 using my student access (while I still had access) to save my sanity.

Bottom cover

Front view of top cover

Side view of top cover

Top cover

I decided to use a press fit to combine the two parts

The wings had to incorporate a motor mount

Top view of assembly

The final product requires 6 different parts and I was fortunate to still be on campus so I had access to some 3D printers in the Maker Lab. The parts took an average of 7 hours to print.

Once everything printed, all the support structures had to be taken out by a tweezer. There was superglue in the lab so I used it to attach to the wings to the bottom cover. I started soldering the wires to the PCB and attached the motors.

Waiting on the superglue to set

By the time everything was done I had one day left on campus before I moved to Boston. I decided to do a quick test of the drone and it managed to fly, but had a very rough landing and the front wings fell off. I didn't manage to fix the front wing again but thinking back, I should have designed the connection from body to wings much better. A temporal fix I thought about on my way to the airport would be to melt some plastic around the wing-body connection similar to how a weld would be used for metal parts.