help designing carbon mini qud to be sold for around $60

joshuabardwell

Senior Member
Mentor
I second jhitsema's comment about wanting to be encouraging, not discouraging. Here's another thing I think you have to consider:

I was thinking why do nice carbon fiber mini quads have to be so expensive the cheapest I know of that you can get is $100

You can get a ZMR250 frame for $35 from Banggood, and by all accounts, it is an excellent frame for the money. It has some consistency issues in its manufacturing, and it lacks some features that higher end frames have (like integrated PDB), but overall, a lot of people seem to like it a lot.

My point is that if you intend to compete on cost, you are never going to beat people who are ordering 10,000 units at a time from China. They are going to beat you in both quality and cost if you are hand-cutting your pieces. So your approach should be to design something unique, that has features that make it worth the price. For example, I am really excited about the new Strider mini from RedRotor, because it has a clever arm design, and because it includes built-in OSD and voltage regulators. I would have bought a ZMR 250 before I heard about the Strider, but suddenly I am willing to pay something like $120 more for the Strider because it has a really appealing design. The challenge will be that the mini quad market is FULL of really excellent designs at almost any price point, so entering it will be challenging. It's not like back when Blackout came out with his frame and he was pretty much the only game in town.
 

Cyberdactyl

Misfit Multirotor Monkey
Yep, to sell frames and make any sort of profit, you're going to have to find some niche or novel approach, such as Benedikt is doing. Even the guys who take frames and components and build for others is drying up. Even if you did have some sort of hugely popular innovative novel frame, you'd only have a few months to make a few bucks before you'd either have to ramp up to small company size like BlackOut has done, or get swamped by the Chinese knockoff of your idea.

Kind of reminds me of the niche market custom PC build-to-order boom of the 90's.
 

rcflyer729

fpv and rc planes
ok well start giving me ideas on the designed like should I do fold able arms or angle the motors all in like Eric Monroe did?
 

rcflyer729

fpv and rc planes
I have an idea and am wondering what you all think What if I mount the mobius under the top plate on the main frame plate and make the standoffs just high enough to cover the mobius (giving enough room to reach the power buttons) and flight controller than I could mount the ccd camera on top this would make the quad a lot more stream line and might add that spoof I am looking for to get people to consider buying
 

rcflyer729

fpv and rc planes
over the past few days I built and flew it It looks awesome and flies really nice there was a lot of jello so I went ahead and added a vibration dampening thing and that got rid of a lot of the jello. The reason I have jello is all my motors are really old and were very cheep. All the motor shafts are bent so it is really a mess. I am going to get new ones soon. Here are some pictures.
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