I'm curious how this compares to foam-frame designs. Being able to customize it is obviously a big advantage, as is the non-solid-infill of 3d-printed parts. I think for stiffness, 3d-printed frames don't work well for quadcopters compared to carbon fiber, but they sound like a nice alternative to foam for fixed-wing. I think the stiffness concern comes up in quads mainly when they do high-performance maneuvers that aren't a concern for the takeoff and landing this device does in that mode. (e.g. high accelerations/manevers of racing-style drones)

If anyone wants to try this: The parts he uses are all standard Chinese-made COTS you can buy on amazon and similar.

The ArduPilot firmware he uses is very flexible and robust, but setting it up is one of the worst UXs I've experienced. Commercial UASs almost universally use PX4 instead.

I have ~200 acres of land I fly a drone survey mission to map. Today, that piloting is done by dronelink and a DJI drone. The challenge is that it's about 3 hours of flight time, give or take, to cover the space, and a given battery is good for about 35 minutes of flight time.

I have 4 batteries, which means I basically need to be refilling my batteries as quickly as I consume them in order to keep flying continuously (unfortunately, even with a quad-charger, I cannot fully sustain this.)

I would LOVE to have a fixed wing drone that could fly over the area and snap close-to-nadir photos as it did so, but the complexity of building and programming a hand built drone seems so much higher than deploying an off the shelf DJI drone. Additionally, the land is steep, with a 1,000+ foot elevation difference, and rugged, and the neighboring land is airspace I cannot fly within, so I couldn't use it to perform my turns.

Author, or others, any thoughts on whether it's worth pursuing a fixed wing aircraft to perform this mapping mission? Or is the best bang for my buck to just buy enough batteries to fly the mission continuously on an off the shelf quadcopter?

This is incredibly impressive. I'd love to hear more about what relevant skills & knowledge you started with, and how you worked out what you'd need to know to complete the project.

How much customisation did you need to make to Ardupilot? Is your drone's control unique, or somehow standardised?

what caught my eye are the SOTA battery cells used (Amprius SA08) - with pack costs of USD 1300. As you can see here: https://www.batemo.com/products/batemo-cell-explorer/?mode=n... - this is by far the best gravimetric energy density on the market.

It's an impressive achievement for an amateur.

He has separate motors for vertical and horizontal flights, which simplifies the design, but creates a rather bad inefficiency, the vertical motors create lots of drag during the horizontal flight.

Maybe it's not a big deal, I'm not sure. Making motors rotate would add weight for sure, thus reducing the range.

I’m curious about the control surfaces. Since you have the four quadcopter motors, you could potentially just induce all three of yaw pitch and roll by powering those up.

I wonder if the reduction in weight from the now unneeded servos would pay for the extra battery drain.

Very cool. Very impressive. I hope it inspires other to build things they're passionate about. "You can just do things. And learn things." No need to wait for permission, or classwork (much less a degree), or a guide/teacher.

“”” ‘A century ago, you needed at least a brother and a bicycle shop to pioneer flight. Today, you just need the right toolchain…’

Incredibly humbling! “””

The imagination to reality loop is most rapidly well-tuned for categories that exist.

As someone who has always been curious about building one but haven’t dove into it, I’d love detailed plans and a beginner-oriented tutorial. I’d be happy to donate/patreon to an effort.

This is the first I've heard of foaming PLA, definitely have to check that out.

Did you do the whole airplane with a small printer like the A1 / A1 mini? I would love to print airfoils but I'm struggling to imagine a way to link individual prints together in a way that preserves stiffness. My 100cm wing would need 10x (10x10cm) printed parts somehow attached to one another.

Until I figure this out it's foamboard building for the type of airplanes I want to build (glider)

Very awesome! Have you tried to see how much payload it could hold in addition to the drone's own weight?

I loved it! But I loved even more the idea of when a person has no prior experience or knowledge in something yet achieves great results in a short period of time. That build mindset is fascinating. The only issue is when applying for normal jobs, unless the interviewer can see through a person's passion, they usually assume you don’t have what it takes or won’t "raise the bar" for whatever they are after. That is, unless you lie or throw in all sorts of buzzwords to create a halo effect.

I have a question, though: Any info about the flight stack? Was it Pixhawk/Ardu, iNav, or something else?

Ardupilot is really cool, and a lot of people use Mission Planner with it. What do people think of Mission Planner, and are there any other software options people enjoy using?

https://ardupilot.org/planner/ - the website seems down right now though.

Nice work! This is very impressive and you’ve shown real resilience and perseverance to work through the challenges you encountered while building this.

Pretty impressive! what's the BOM here. That battery seems expensive (most expensive part?)

What's the weight on the batteries alone?

Can we have a followup video testing the 130 mile range, or optimizing it? I would like to see the limits this could push

Nice work! It's incredible, it looks super robust.

Very impressive. How important are control surfaces with a multimotor design?

Congratulations this is really fantastic and quite inspiring!

Have you released the BOM/STLs anywhere?

Love this! This is what HN is for.

Happen to have the BoM and the 3d parts available in a repo?

Would love to try my hand at reproducing the work you did!

How far can it be remote controlled?

damn, I would like built this too

hope I can build mine 3d printer lab first

Awesome work OP, great to see your journey.

Impressive! Can you share the design to the Ukrainians? [be careful, so it won't leak anywhere else]. 3 hours loitering can mean a lot on a battlefield.

OP is now on the FBI watch list.

Top speed?

For anyone not familiar with acronyms (like me), VTOL stands for "Vertical Take-Off and Landing".