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Beta Test of New Nacelle Design

A project log for MiniHawk VTOL

A fully 3D-Printable VTOL aircraft, designed as a hybrid fixed-wing plank + tricopter planform. For FPV and UAV experimentation.

steve-carlsonSteve Carlson 11/01/2021 at 03:360 Comments

As hinted at in the release notes of Version 2 (almost a month ago), the current nacelle arm design inherits a flaw that has been present in the project from its earliest foundations in 2018 and 2019. The forward pair of motors are/were tilted with a four-bar linkage which placed a static torque load on the tilt servos. That linkage design has a failure mode in which the respective servo stalls when trying to pull the motor down/forward, and this results is a twirling vehicle when trying to perform a forward VTOL transition, or even when just aggressively hovering. 

After several intensive days/weeks of CAD work, I have come to a stopping point on the nacelle redesign. While I am going to include these changes in the coming version 2.1 release of the project, I am trying to contact anyone and everyone who is building their own MiniHawk-VTOL to provide them the option to use the new arm design before encountering the "twirling issue" first hand. While I've printed prototypes of the new nacelle to confirm that it works and everything fits, I still need to test the entire thing on a flying vehicle, so this is very much a "beta". Here is a link to the STLs:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14OMxRNMnFPUckKqzTNQ1_S6gNBs8WnNN?usp=sharing

Main changes and features:

Regards,

-Steve Carlson

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