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Quadrotor Frame Suggestions and Tips

Posted by Allen Babb on August 18, 2011 at 4:01pm

Since there isn't one up already, I decided make a thread here with some tips and suggestions that I come across when building a custom quadrotor from scratch.

 

Anyone else who has a few tips or suggestions to building custom quadrotors, feel free to post!

 

I'll start with:

 

Don't use all-thread, also known as threaded rod, to keep your hub structure together. It's evil!

If you do end up using this in your design, be prepared to spend hours of taking it apart and puting it back together. 90% of that time will be in moving the nuts around on the all-threads.

 

 

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Tags: frames, hints, multicopter, quad, suggestions, tips
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Replies

  • Allen Babb August 30, 2011 at 8:43am

    Using 1/4 inch round rods for the arms presents the problem of making a motor mount that will stay in place. So far, I've come up with a custom-milled motor mount design that screws into the bottom of the motors and simply clamps onto the rods.

     

    Advantages of this setup:

    • Can move the motors to various distances to test the dynamics.
    • Very lightweight
    • Very low drag profile
    • Arms may be disassembled for ground transportation
    • Can be extended past the motors and threaded to allow balancing weights to be screwed onto it.

     

    Disadvantages:

    • Difficult to align the motors to be perpendicular to the ground plane.
    • 1/4 inch aluminum is somewhat flexible, and acts like a stiff spring if the motors are run at higher throttles.
    • Current motor mount design only has two screws to hold down the motors.
    • Current motor mount is not "universal," and won't be able to attach to some motor styles.

    I've refrained from drilling any holes into the rods, because I'm afraid it would take too much strength out of them and would still only have 2 points of contact...

  • 3D Robotics
    Julian August 18, 2011 at 5:20pm

    Id recommend hex standoff, they work pretty well with a little less time spent screwing and un screwing

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