Drone Arm Parametric Design

thingiverse

I am new to quadcopter designs & was not sure what size I wanted my quadcopter to be. After looking at several designs, I decided to come up with a parametric Arm design so I could easily change some key dimensions of the arm & see how it looked visually put together. This is not a remix, but did use the wire channel idea from the Peon230 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:629338. I made the ledges on each side of the arms 8 sided which has worked well for me in other designs adding strength with less plastic & in this case giving a channel for the wires to lay in also. There is also an option to make the arms flat in case you do not need that channel. There are quite a few dimensions you can change for this design & I have included a PDF file showing the variables that may not be obvious from the description in the openscad file. You can use this as visual aid to see how different length arms, locations & rotations affect your design. Once you have it the way you want it, you can set the PartView variable to 0 to display your arm for printing. The arms generated by this could be used for Tricopters, Hexacopters or Octocopters. Some small changes would need to be made to the code to visually show the other style drones. The frame I am using for the visual on these arms is a modification to the BumbleBee Quad http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:745092 . As you can see from the screen capture, this will show you whether your props interfere with each other or be in the camera view. If they interfere, you can just change the length of the arms, the size of the props, rotation of the front and/or back arms or the location of where the arms are located on the frame.