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Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

252 points by noleary

by mickeyp

4 subcomments

You know you're doing a great job, OP, when the peanut gallery here has nothing more substantial to add than to critique your em-dashes; greek-latin root word mix-ups despite the common vernacular having moved on from that; and lack of title brevity.
Congratulations --- this is a super cool project. I wonder if you've considered using ultralight filaments and 3dprinting the frame? PLA is stiff but brittle, and I know Bambu and a few others sell specialised versions that supposedly weigh less than normal.

by Tossrock

1 subcomments

Something I've wondered for octocopters - could using a ring instead of arms be beneficial for weight? 6.28r < 8r, but then again the arm radius is usually less than the full circle, and some components want to be centrally located, etc. I could imagine holding the central components in tension via light filaments (carbon fiber, nylon, etc) in tension, vs having to have rigid structure, but the small factor between 6.28 and 8 and maybe makes it not worth it.

by sanex

2 subcomments

People are so jealous. This is cool as hell.

by felooboolooomba

0 subcomment

This is cool as sugar! I have to ask though, how many end mills did you go through milling G10 fiberglass and carbon fiber‽
I've heard the dust from carbon fiber is second to asbestos for inhaling.

by geod_of_ix

0 subcomment

I love everything about this. Well done! but missed opportunity to name it R_of_L-copter.

by pjdkoch

0 subcomment

Kudos for such a great learning journey!

by cyclopeanutopia

0 subcomment

Will follow a fellow Polish inventor! :)

by orn

0 subcomment

Super cooool

by melagonster

0 subcomment

I do not notice that the time of posts is reversed haha. I am confused whether you had build it.
Thank you, it's cool!

by quibono

3 subcomments

If I were to get a dirt cheap Chinese drone, would that be more likely to use RL or MCP? What’s the “standard”?

by TacticalCoder

2 subcomments

Amazing: I'm watching lots of homemade builds atm.
I've got a question: why CNC milling and not just FDM 3D printed parts? TFA doesn't talk much about it except saying she went to a machine shop.
> 2. CNC milling forms out of G-10 fiberglass (arms) and 5mm carbon fiber (body)
TFA also says this:
> The solution for this is to 3D print a 0-tolerance assembly jig to hold the arms in perfect position while the center of the drone is superglued together.
Why not 3D print it all?
There's this guy who built a drone that can fly for 3 hours and cover hundreds of miles, 3D printed at home on a $250 printer:
https://youtu.be/e7AIKGDrlgs
Then there was the $200 K quote for the body for a car that just did Pike's Peak with a four times Pike's Peak champion and instead the team... 3D-printed the car's body at home (something like 40 parts, assembled together), which cost them less than $2 K to make (1/100th of the quoted price for the car's body). Here's the vid where they print all the parts (on a $1500 consumer printer):
https://youtu.be/nt85nTMnY1w
Basically: why CNC milling and not 3D printing at home when many drones enthusiasts (and now too people building race cars) simply print parts at home on a consumer-grade 3D printer?

by tamimio

0 subcomment

Love it, great to explore and learn, and I like the mixed background too of cybersec and robotics (all the way to CNC), just like myself, I think these two new fields will make a new industry, similar to OT cyber but more niche.
Which also means great people can go beyond what’s their school was about, so a CS major doing CNC isn’t “weird” or different, I remember when applying for jobs in systems in aerospace industry and get rejected despite having a systems background too, with feedback of “they are looking for people with education only in aerospace”, which is idiotic thing to consider.
So good luck OP, start exploring hacking mavlink or similar protocols which is what im working on.

by Mona1

0 subcomment

[dead]

by m3kw9

2 subcomments

Why not just say from scratch instead of no prior experience, is it to brag

by ramon156

4 subcomments

Hm making an AI assisted page and replacing the emdashes with double dashes seems like more work than to just rewrite the text yourself. Not sure why you would do that.

by adrian_b

9 subcomments

Nit pick:
The name "octocopter" does not make sense. "Helicopter" is a compound word made of "helico-" and "pter", which means "screw-wings". "Octo-" means eight, "-co-" means nothing.
"Octopter" would be a correct compound word meaning "8-wings", but that would be ambiguous, so the object discussed in TFA is better named just "8-propeller drone".