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Drone Chassis and Flying Wheels

A project log for Drone Swarm

Drones of varying complexity swarm an area, forming a distributed sensor and actuator network.

les-hallLes Hall 03/12/2015 at 16:440 Comments

I have made some progress on the Drone Chassis, which is basically a parameterized OpenSCAD box holding one circuit board. Revision 2 of the box does away with the unnecessary posts for holding the circuit board in place as they did not print well and uses the end caps and walls to do that job. The box super glues together nicely and the unglued cover snaps into place.

I emailed the 10BitWorks Hackerspace here in San Antonio Texas about my ideas for a "LAW" drone which is capable of traveling on Land, in Air, and over Water. My friends told me that typically a vehicle performs well in one domain only and mixed domain vehicles perform poorly in either domain. I take this advice to heart and change my plan to include single purpose vehicles, dual purpose vehicles, and the oddball triple purpose vehicle. Why not, it's a swarm isn't it?

To that end I figured out the math (trig) behind a tire/propeller that can function in both Land and Water environs. Here is a photo of the 3D printer printing four of them:

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