First Flight: Great White

This is the first flight of the CASA 3D printed quadcopter which we will be using for the Royal Institution Coding for Year 9 project. The frame was designed by en-topia and 3D printed in PLA by @digitalurban using his MakerBot printer. I'm just glad it actually flies and that I didn't hit anything.

To give some sense of scale, the frame is a 100mm quadcopter in an X configuration. The hardware is taken from the HubSan X4 because it's easy to source in the UK and fairly cheap. I'm using the 4 coreless DC motors from the HubSan X4 with the standard props and the generation 2 flight controller board that contains the power connection for the camera and four LED connections. I had intended to use the hardware from my original generation 1 HubSan without the LEDs, but it's about 3 years old now and eventually gave up completely. The replacement from Amazon arrived last night, so I soldered the additional connectors onto the new board and connected it all up for the first test flight. There are 0.1 inch pitch header pins soldered to the motor wires and servo plugs (Futaba DuPont connectors) with wires soldered to the flight controller so the four motors and controller are removable. Everything is held onto the frame with elastic bands (that's probably why it isn't very stable).

To give some sense of scale, it's flying in about a 1 metre box, so I was getting turbulence off of everything. Not exactly the best way to do a test flight, but I needed to film it flying. Also, the frame is warped quite badly (water and PLA don't mix), so I had to be very careful with the throttle as it was causing a lot of motion in strange directions. In the air it does feel heavy compared to a regular HubSan, but then we know it's about 9g heavier. Also, a bit of extra weight might be good to keep them from hitting the ceiling when we run the workshop session with 5 of these flying and complete novice pilots.

All in all, I think that's quite a successful test and we're now going to build some more frames with different designs.

Credits:
Pilot: Richard
Frame design: en-topia
3D printing: @digitalurban

Funded from the UCL BEAMs public engagement stream from an EPSRC Impact Acceleration Award  as part of Dr. Martin Austwick's public engagement work. For more on Martin's work, follow his Global Lab podcasts.