Drake & Branson Drone Project

The Project:

This project is going to be a collaboration between Drake High School and The Branson School. We are designing, fabricating, and programming a drone(specifically a quad-copter). We will buy parts that cannot be fabricated in the shop, but will attempt to fabricate as much of the drone as possible.

Here is a picture of what this project may look like:

The timeline of this project is we will complete the drone in February or March.

In completing this project, we hope to improve upon programming, CAD, and CAM skills, along with as always for any engineering project, troubleshooting, teamwork and other important skills.

For this project, I was in charge of the fabrication of the frame of the drone. We decided the best medium to use for this would be pla. I used Solidworks 2016-17 for all of the CAD work I would be doing.

The Arms

The arms of the drone are very important because they need to house the motors and be strong enough and rigid enough to support these motors through flight. My first step in designing the arms was measuring the motors we would be using to figure out how they would be housed. With these measurements plus measurements from the manual that came with the motors, I came up with a simple but sturdy design, and made different small changes to reduce weight, and fit the motor just right.

First design Second Design

Final Version

The Main Body

Now that I had completed designing the arms, and the fit to the motor had been successfully tested, I moved on to the design of the main body where most of the electronics would be. Part of my design was based on attaching the arms to the main body. Also, the design didn't need to be very complex because we were using double sided tape to easily mount the electronics. So, I came up with a design for the main frame that looked good and functioned well.

First Version