Monday, July 7, 2014

New toy / tool

Sorry for the long time span with no entries, its been a very busy time. We moved cities for seven week while my daughter performed in the musical Annie. The show was not brought to Christchurch as we do not have anywhere for it to be performed since the earthquake. It was a big deal as it was an international show brought over from the Uk to New Zealand.

http://anniethemusical.co.nz/

Super proud of my little girl for making it through the tough auditions and getting into the cast. But it did mean that we had to move cities for 7 weeks. No mean feat and expensive. One of the causalities of this was the T-Bucket project, it had to be liquidated so we could afford for the family to move cities.

However there was some spare $$ left over and I invested in a second hand 3D printer. It can not do huge prints 110mm x 110mm x 110mm but I thought that will be plenty big enough to make multi rotor parts.

So over the last couple of months I have been learning to design and print parts. the printer is an !UP Mini shown below.


It has really enabled me to make some pretty cool parts for my multi-rotors.  Over the next couple of days I hope to add a few entries on the main things I have been printing. 

A great resource for cool stuff to print is http://www.thingiverse.com/
It has some great multi-rotor objects to download and print. 

As for software I am not a CAD user, and didn't want to spend a lot of time learning a program to just do some very basic shapes / designs to print. After a fair bit of research I decided to use Tinkercad

Its basic and you have to be creative sometimes to get the shape / object you want, but works well for me and the simple designs I make.

So what have I designed and printed:
  • OPQ Quad Frame arm protectors
  • Gimbal control case
  • Gimbal for a gopro Hero Black
  • Universal anti-vibration mounting system for all my multi-rotors (Flip FPV, F450, Titan Tricopter)
  • Titan battery protector and leg combo
  • Ublox GPS holder

There is alot of other stuff, that is jus the multi-rotor bits.

Look for the details on some of these coming soon.