Drone Frames
2016 - 2020
3D Design

As a 9th grader I had always wanted to start something and create something new. Given that I had been flying and building drones for about two years at that point, I saw that there were a few frames on the market in the 150mm class (namely the Hovership Zuul Gozer & Shendrones Shrieker) but it was still relatively developing. With my little knowledge of CAD having only done TinkerCAD I chose to use OpenSCAD because it was heavily mentioned by the make magazine at the time.

Due to OpenSCAD’s design this was quite challenging, and it took around 3 months to go from a very well defined sketch on paper to a multi plate 3D model that I could test 3D prints of. After building a few 3D printed prototypes I raised enough money to get a carbon fiber prototype made.

Life got busy around this point, and the market exploded so there was no value for it as a product. Building and testing this frame I quickly realized that I had made some very critical design mistakes. I left holes in the arms for wire routing which broke after it’s first major crash.

In 2020 I realized I still had all the moving parts for that 150mm drone and so in SolidWorks designed a frame based around the same “wheelbase” and similar design to the old one but just playing around with 3D printing instead. This frame turned out a bit more interesting but in the end the PETG was not strong enough and had a resonant frequency causing a runaway and then breaking into many pieces.