Learning to fly something has it’s obvious problems – things tend to fall to the ground in case something goes wrong. I’ve already had my share of both, yet this drone refuses to die – and I love it – so I just keep fixing it. This time I did break some frame pieces, some more 3D-printed frame pieces and a VTX (Video Transmitter).
The frame I’m using consists mainly of 2 ‘plates’. The bottom one is thick and still in one piece 🙂 The top one, however, was not so lucky – where a battery goes, so when the drone experiences ‘shock accelerations’ this puts a lot of load onto this frame piece.
So – the majority of the frame is fine. Could the missing piece be 3D-printed then? Well, I tried it. I designed a simple part in FreeCad and used my Prusa to bring it to life. I used PET-G with 0,3mm layer height and close to 100% fill:
It worked great…. for a short while, until I crashed the drone hard enough ^^ So i printed another one, and another one, while adjusting the project. They all break eventually xD
Thats fine though. Im gonna be crashing less and less, right? It’s gonna be fine. However, in the meantime I managed to destroy something else: the VTX antenna port (and yet another frame piece as well):
Luckily I didn’t loose the antenna, and the socket was still there. Still possible and easy to fix.
And ready to go again
There’s something worth mentioning here: it turns out u can actually fly using a VTX with ripped antenna port ^^, I mean – obviously the range is waay smaller but hey – I’m not going far anyway (yet). It’s also possible to fly with damaged frame. It’s actually quite amazing what a bad condition this thing can be in and still manage to function.