I attended the Bay Area meetup last weekend. One interesting thing that Chris Anderson mentioned was his philosophy that it's often more important to make things that are easy to repair than it is to make things that can't break.
I almost immediately had an object lesson in this by crashing my quad. Two props were broken, so I put it in the car to take care of later. When I got it home, I noticed that one of the motor mounts was bent to an almost 45 degree angle. Fixing it took less than a minute. Thanks AeroQuad!
http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2011/04/repairing-aeroquad-motor-mount.html
Comments
Even the thousands euros Microdrone carbon frame has its breaking points.
Didn't know about your philosophy but i like it.
In fact, two days ago I discussed with a friend about choosing between CF or Alu arms for a quad.
We ended up deciding that CF will may be lighter, stiffer and will look cooler, but in case of a crash we rather change a cheap bent alu arm than the CF arm remain intact with broken center plates and electronics.
By the way, kind of Gaui (330 Terminator or Termiator) clone is the already mentioned Quadcopter Frame V1 from HK.
For example, the Guai 330 quad is made up of lots of fiddly carbon fiber pieces, which all snap together. It falls to bits with every hard landing, but can be snapped back together in seconds. Likewise for the Raven, which "stall lands" and typically falls into between three and six parts on impact.
The ArduCopter arms are made up of very thin aluminum, which tends to bend in a crash. Some people prefer thicker, stronger aluminium, but that makes for a heavier quad. I'd rather stock up on cheap spares and have the longer flight times for the light frame.