Skip to main content

Folding arms on my quad - A game-changer

So i've been looking over the last few months how I can get to fly more of my quadcopter drone for both research and leisure. The major drawback of the 1.6kg drone is its form factor at the time. Being a H-frame quad with cross rotor length of over 80cm, I had to purchase 110L storage bin to keep it safe and damage-free.

After much research I ended up a natural solution that would involved just a steel saw and good eye for detail. The other (obvious) requirement for this folding mechanism is that it should make the deployment time as fast as possible with a few if not no special equipment. This led the the solution of cutout the area around the second bolt of each arm to allow pivoting action on the first bolt. The cutout should also be such that bolt hole remains to be used as a stopper to maintain symmetry along the quad x and y axis. The high contact friction will be used to ensure the arms remain in the required position throughout a particular flight.

After much sawing and filing, the pics are below. Let me know what you think:





Labels:
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Setting up the Tarot T4-3D gimbal on the Pixhawk 2.4.8 with Specktrum dx6 Gen2 toggle switch

So i took the challenge of setting up the Tarot gimbal not just for inherent stable video footage but also the flexibility of controlling it from the radio control. However, I encountered quite a few challenges which made me aware that I'm not the one only in this battle . It's quite clear that the setup of the Tarot gimbal using its own software is completely different from how it's been described in the Ardupilot/Arducopter webpage and in mission Planner. In Mission Planner and it's associated site makes one believe that it should be done through software, only to realize that in actual fact the setup is more complex than that.  After two evenings of trying various combinations, I realized the getting the pixhawk Aux channels to communicate with the T4 gimbal requires the following steps: - The Pixhawk Pin9 (Aux1) needed to be activated to pass through user-chosen channel from the transmitter. For the Dx6 Gen2 it was the channel 6, which can assigned the ...
2 comments
Read more

Matlab to C/C++ code development - Some learning points

Over the last few years, the engineers at the company have invested both their time and sleepless nights in formulating a process for the development of Machine learning algorithms that will satisfy real-time constraints with minimal RAM usage. This is quite a tall task as per default, that would force one to do their development directly in C language. Although that seems like the right choice, the downside is the direct correlation of the debugging time with algorithm complexity.  Such a time could have been rather used in optimizing the algorithm within the MATLAB environment which has excellent tools for the analysis, plotting and debugging. So it was decided to rather learn the Code generation process with the hope that future algorithm could be designed in a similar fashion without the hassle of the compiler-specific run-time issues. The development of this machine learning algorithm would eventually be implemented in a 32bit, 160Mhz speed, 260KB RAM microcontroll...
1 comment
Read more

Setup ArduPilot flight modes with DX6 Gen 2

Hi, I've looked around the web to get an understanding the setup of the Ardupilot flight modes with a Spektrum DX6 2nd generation and there was none. So I decided to write this blog. The few things to consider when doing this: Please follow the instruction given on the ardupilot webpage . Have the Pixhawk hardware connected to Mission Planner (I have 1.3.50 - Copter V3.5.3)  Use the display bar in the Radio Calibration page as a guide while changing the rate pulse widths on your transmitter. I've used switch D to change the pulse width ranges on channel 5.
1 comment
Read more