Quadcopter Desgin

About

Time: Sep 2020 - Jan 2021

Work: In a 4-people group

Role: Project manager. Scheduled the timeline and gantt chart and distribute the workload. Also responsible for the frame's structure calculating and assembling electronic components.

Budget: 300 US dollars

Skills Gained: Lead the team and plan the schedule, Solidwork, Structure analysis

Target

During the pandemic, people are not allow to go out and meet each others. We aimed to design a quadcopter that can carry up to 1.5 kilogram goods to people. We must complete this task wihtin certain constraints.

Constraints

1. Budget: 300 USD

2. Time: 8 weeks

3. Loads: up to 1.5 kilograms

4. Flight duration: At least 10 minutes

Schedule I managed (Gantt Chart)

Two incidents resulted in two delays.

The first delay is that the school manufacturing place are not able to help us to cut the carbon fiber plate. Hence, we redesigned the structure of body again using wood as fast as we could

The second delay is the shipping delay due to typhoon.

Sturcture Design & Analysis

We decided to desgin a hybird-H frame quadcopter, and we first plan use carbon fiber since it has the strongest stress bearing and less bending within same mass compared to other materials. However, as I mentioned before, the school didn't allow us to cut the carbon fiber so we used wood instead. These are the draft and the solidwork of our design.

We used solidwork to estimate the weight of the quadcopter frame and use the result to esitmate the safe thickness and the bending of frame. After applying safety factor 1.5, we decided to use 5 mm thick body frame so that the bending will be only 0.00067 mm.

Motor throttle testing

We built our own motor throttle test stand so that we won't go over the budget. Even the website has provide some data under certain throttle, it is important to test by our own again to make sure everything works what we want.

Motor stand we built