Foldable quad frame design

enivid

Junior Member
Hey guys,

(Apologies in advance this is a cross post from wanted/for sale not really sure what happened there but appears I posted this in the wrong place)

I wanted to share my laser cut quad frame build with you to get some design input and gauge interest in this type of design. My version 1 can be found at http://flitetest.com/articles/foldable-quad-build-log and http://flitetest.com/articles/laser-cut-foldable-quad-design.

I've gone over the improvements of my design in this post: http://flitetest.com/articles/laser-cut-foldable-quad-frame-design-v2

All of the part are bamboo built by ponoko and my original design challenge was to make a cheap frame that required only minimal of hardware to build: M3 screws, zipties and nylon spacers (both cheap and one very easy to source).

So let's build!

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I used metal M3 hex screws to assemble the quad pivot.

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Applying some blue locktite

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Trying to get some tension on the zipties to hold the landing gear securely

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Secured the ESC to the plate using zipties

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The two bottom ESCs are ready, feeding the top two ESCs through.

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Secured the top ESCs with zipties and completed the core assembly using nylon spacers

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The bottom plate has a convenient Velcro strap anchor for the battery.

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Here is a side view of the completed ESC sandwich. I use a lynchpin to secure the Quad for flight since it can be folded.

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Placed the KK board on some foam (from its packaging) and mounted it using some leftover zipties.

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Used zipties to cleanup the cabling, the booms have little ziptie anchors that make this very easy. In this build I used spare zipties terminators to give it a nice clean finish like on the landing gear.

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Secured the RX using a ziptie and a leftover ziptie anchor.

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The gopro fits perfectly between the plates (I have a nice collection of nylon spacers to achieve this). The Velcro strap keeps it safe here... This wasn't my design intent but it's a nice little feature, I will test its robustness on my maiden.

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Folded quadcopter for storage.

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Deployed quad ready to fly!