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  • Kudos for such a great learning journey!
    by pjdkoch
  • 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 quibono
  • Cool project! For a DIY beginner, what would be a good starting point for a "normal" drone/octocopter project?
    by lhaussknecht
  • I find it very hard to believe that someone who has never done any CAD could design that with Fusion 360 in a day. I do lots of 3D design with Fusion and there is a serious learning curve. It's not something you can pick up in a day. She is doubtless much smarter than me, but that's not credible.
    by urban_winter
  • 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 TacticalCoder
  • 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 Tossrock
  • This is very impressive! I researched fault-tolerant octorotor control using RL in grad school for a NASA project. Perhaps this may be helpful[1, see section 8.3]! The field is moving fast, so there may be better or more suitable approaches out there now.

    For folks who are interested in UAV physics, I wrote up an explainer[2].

    [1]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RTEVRd0XCWLuDXY2nkbmYuOaa5x...

    [2]: https://iahmed.me/post/drone-physics/

    by hazrmard
  • Hi!! I'm Karolina, and this is my project! Had no idea this got posted until someone DMed me about it on LinkedIn. Feel free to ask any questions or follow along via X (karolina_dubiel)

    Thanks so much for all the kind words, it means a lot!

    by kar0lina

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