Gollly-gee-wiz, take off your socks, because you’re
going to need your toes to count the number of hours we researched quadcopters
to have any real idea of what we’re doing. It most likely did not help that we
chose a project that neither one of knew anything about so we had to learn
everything from the ground up. Richard and I have both researched hours on
hours by ourselves and probably about eight hours together. There's probably
twenty four to thirty hours of research between the two of us if not more,
hence why you are now sockless.
We started by just
finding general information and reading guides on quadcopter builds, what types
of motors are used, what variables affect the propellers, what frames are made
of, and the options for the control board, etc. We had 5 snow days since the
start of this so we’ve had some time to work on learning what we need to. We
set the high goal of creating a comprehensive parts list for this Wednesday and
we did pretty good, but boy was it a long, snowy road.
We started the whole
thing off by laying down a maximum budget, how much would both of us be willing
to put forward to build a fairly high end quadcopter? We decided on a combined
budget of $400 as Richard has “a good amount of money.” As we read we created a
list of the major components that we’d need:
>Brushless motors/ Propellers/ speed
controllers
>Frame
>Battery
>R-C Transmitter+ Receiver
>Flight Control Board
Now this may not seem like much, it's only five items
right? WRONG. People write books just on the function
of the motors and how to find the right ones. We had to calculate the
approximate weight of a quadcopter we hadn’t built in order to find the right
motors, so we had to find the weight of the components that we didn’t know we
wanted to find the weight of the quadcopter we didn’t have. Confusing, right?
We decided on designing and 3-D printing the frame, found several batteries to
narrow down, looked for the cheapest R-C transmitter, and found different
options for the control board.
The rough estimates for weight with the motor systems
we were looking at were upwards of 1700 grams. That’s too much. That’s crazy
heavy for a quadcopter the size we’re building and we didn’t know where the
weight was coming from. Turns out it was my fault. I had grossly overestimated
the weight of the frame at almost 1000 grams and after many recalculations and
estimates we found it to be less than 500. We continued to narrow down the list
of things we wanted, making sure the puzzle pieces could all fit as we went,
and things were looking good. Then my computer broke. Failure of the hard
drive. Unrecoverable (I'm still salty about that). Luckily I had made backups of all the
quadcopter files regularly but it still took me a while to be fully operational
again. We eventually got it done though. A finished list of the price and
weight of all the main components. 1100-1200 grams and $300. Well within weight
limitation and budget. Awesome.
This is the picture of the motors we're going to use. We're getting higher end
ones to give us more wiggle room with weight and power. If you'd like to read
more about them you can click the caption to go to the website. We're going to
outfit the control board with GPS so we can program auto functions in and
hopefully make it easier to fly. We also decided on the biggest battery we
could afford, because why not?
I apologize for such a long post, however there is a
lot that got done over the past few weeks and even this barely scratches the
surface of the information. Over the next couple weeks we hope to finish and
refine the design and have a complete CAD model of the quadcopter.
