DIY Attempts to Fly

I need a camera that flies for a long time. VTOL craft afford us that and are cool. Introducing Hope: A 3D printed VTOL carrying a Siyi A8 gimbaled camera. The airframe is an Avenger VTOL from Titan Dynamics. I've made a few custom parts for it to fit my sensors. We have a couple successful flights and a couple unsuccessful flights and I'm currently still in the quadplane tuning phase.

Hope

Bill of Materials

Core components for these builds. I’ll add wiring notes and PDFs here later.

T-Motor MN5212 KV420 Motor (x4)

T-Motor AIR 40A ESC (x4)

QWinOut Carbon Fiber Propellers 13x5.5

OVONIC 6S LiPo Battery 6000mAh 22.2V

Cube Orange + ADS-B

Herelink Air Unit

Here3

Mauch

SIYI A8

Digital Airspeed Sensor (Pitot Tube)

3D Printing

I learned a ton about printing during this project. I printed initially in ABS with 2 walls and 3% infill (2 walls is too many). I reprinted the entire airframe with 1 wall at 3% infill. I reprinted the fuselage with foaming LWPLA. Print quality is lower than ABS by a lot, but it's undeniably a little lighter. The Here3 holding hatch cover is a custom Tim part. I tweaked the underslung camera hole to allow SIYI A8 wiring.

Parts that require extra rigidity including motor mounts and the landing gear were recommended to be printed with "high temperature filament" at 20-25% infill. I initially printed them in PETG, but I think I would probably recommend PC going forward. The landing legs come in two parts with holes in them such that you can put carbon fiber tubes in them to "reinforce" them. I believe this is a mistake. I have had several hard landings and those "carbon fiber reinforced joints" were the failure points each time, and so I reprinted mine in PC as single whole parts.

Hope MK I

I'm afraid of transitioning to forward flight in two different frames now lol.

Foam hover test

V1 Airframe