When I first joined ASME as a freshman mechanical engineering student, I was very excited to join and work on this particular project. I had come into school with quite the affinity for FPV drones after watching the amazing cinematic videos of JohnnyFPV and Sam Kolder (I would highly recommend watching some of their content if you are unfamiliar).
The task for this project was to design a wooden frame for a quadcopter drone, that we would assemble and fly at the end of the semester.
We started off this project by learning the basic aerodynamic principles of quadcopter drones. This gave us a good basis for understanding what the frames of these drones should look like and what variables we would need to control in our design.
We needed to reduce mass as much as possible because the heavier our frames were, the more motor power going into lift instead of pitch and roll thrust. The best way to reduce our frame's weight would be to cut holes in the frame in sections that aren't adding support.
We also were told to reduce the sharpness of all corners as much as possible. We didn't have enough time in this project to learn Fine Element Method (FEM) simulation to find stress points in our designs. However, I am excited to begin learning to use this software for future projects.
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