Lightweight Snap-Foldable Y6

3689552824?profile=original

It all started with a desire for a lightweight, compact, easily-foldable Y6 airframe... but after hours of scouring the interwebs, I wasn't able to find what I was looking for. I also didn't like the idea of having to carry tools to fold/unfold my copter, or the idea of dropping loose hardware out in the field.

So, I designed and built my own. Ta-da!

The design features carbon fiber plates and tubes, 3d-printed ABS mounts, and a coaxial motor mount with built-in vibration damping. The snap-fold mechanism is very secure, allowing me to go from backpack to flight-ready in seconds -- no tools required! I'm still working on optimizing the electronics mounts and wire routing, but everything has come together quite nicely so far. (These photos were taken with surrogate ABS plates... CNC-cut CF plates should be here this week!)

The most unique feature of this design is that it can also be built as an X4 or even X8 with the same frame parts! Both X and Y variants are approximately 27" in diameter, folding down to about 17" for transport.

3689552843?profile=original

3689552902?profile=original

Here's a look at the folded X4 strapped to my backpack. It's super lightweight and I can hardly tell the copter is there. I can't wait to hike this thing up a mountain and fly a GoPro around!

3689552928?profile=original

As for the light-weight objective mentioned above, the Y airframe weight is about 200g, and the X is about 30g more. With everything except a battery, my X4 weighs 994g, and the Y6 weighs just over 1200g.

I've only brought it up in a hover so far, but I'll be conducting endurance testing in the next week or two. With a 4s/5Ah battery, I'm expecting 15-20 mins of flight time, depending on payload.

Finally, I plan to release the design files as OSH, but I need to tweak a few things first. If anybody's interested in the actual hardware, I have great contacts for both 3d printing and CNC carbon fiber plates.

E-mail me when people leave their comments –

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones

Comments

  • very interesting build! any updates?

  • I was looking for some thing in the 650mm range...
    I did find a similar Y6 from Aerial Freaks...
    http://aerialfreaks.com/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=Y6&...
  • I took a long break from this to build a couple other copters... finally getting back into it. I made several improvements and will be building / testing this next month. Stay tuned if you would like.
  • There are some... if you search more

    http://www.ebay.com/itm/HJ-Y3-Carbon-Fiber-Foldable-Tricopter-3-axi...

  • Is thread still alive?

    I am in the OP's shoes, I can find nothing commercially avalible that is light weight, foldable and quick to deploy. I really like this design!

    I am trying to come up with a backpackable quick deploy multi that carry a FPV gear and stay up for at least 20mins. This will be used for SAR mission support.
  • Wow, I love your design,

    Can you share with us some plans?

    Thanks a lot.

  • Very nice, I like how it straps on to your backpack. I'd love to build something similar of my own. It would be great if you could share the design files and your contacts for  3d printing and CNC carbon fiber plates.

  • Very cool Eric.  Please post the flight vids.

  • Great to hear your flight time..

  • A very similar setup, i.e. foldable, full carbon, X4/6/8 multiconfiguration, etc, exists on the market for more than one year as Mini650. This is mine:

    3692849543?profile=original

    985 grams without battery, what you see.

    Cool, but big loss of efficiency, will redo as quad as was before. Flight time 8 minutes as Y6, compared to 13 minute as quad, with the same 3s 2700mAh battery.

This reply was deleted.