Replacement Frame for Ares Recon Drones

thingiverse

My son recently found an Ares Recon FPV on super-closeout at a local hobby shop. It took him all of 3 flight hours to break the frame. Rather than spend $5.99 on a replacement, I spent a few hours cobbling this together. There are still some clearances that need to be worked out -- the nacelles are still 2mm too close together front-to-back, and I'm planning on increasing the friction fit on the nacelle bumper ends.. I have them secured with rubber cement for the time-being on my son's drone. I'm reusing as many of the original parts as possible for this iteration. The bumpers, the guards, the props, even the shielding and support behind the FPV cam board, etc. I was able to fly. It works. These toys are super-cool. I expect that I'll keep updating things over the next few days here, but so far -- so good. Printed in PETG, with a bunch of tweaked settings, I was able to get a very flight-worthy frame that came in several grams under the original frame. :-) Since printing saved 3 grams, I put those 3 extra grams into using standard sized 600mAh batteries that happen to weigh.... an extra 3 grams compared to the original flight battery. I get about 7 minutes of flight time now. Updated versions of this are at my github repo, along with the revision history. https://github.com/bvarner/bricabrac/tree/master/drone There you'll find all manner of tweaks, including a version where the center of gravity is moved lower (mid-mounted battery) which seems to fly far more stable with the original control board. :-D