My 550 Class 3D printable hexacopter

[loganj13]

Here's a peak at my 3D Printed 550 Class Hexacopter that I've been designing for a few weeks for the DJI E310 hex set.. The arms fold downwards, (see Hinge1.png for visualization). Each arm is mounted through the brown part with a M3 screw, creating a horizontal hinge. During the printing of each arm, I drop in an M5 nut into a space for it inside the larger hole on the black piece of each arm (white piece on non E310 version). After that I unpause the print job, and it prints over the extra space for the nut, locking it inside the arm. I then screw the brown and grey piece together, with the aligned 18-36 holes used. Then the arm can fold down, and can fold into a horizontal (flight ready) position. Then, through the hole in the grey piece, through the arm (and the nut inside of it), I screw in a GoPro (M5) thumbscrew, locking the arm tightly into its horizontal(flight ready) position. All six arms do this, and it folds down to a L x W footprint of under 300mm, much better than 550mm . On the arms, the red parts are the ones I am going to wrap LED strips around. I will also stick the included LEDs on the bottom of the arms for in-flight status info. The parts inbetween the two long piece of the arms are all exactly 10mm tall, same as the 420S escs. I added a groove on the black, largest parts of the arms for the LED wires to sneak under the ESCs. The white piece at the end of each arm has a whole in its side made for a cable sleeve, so they can be routed out the whole and into the frame. The gimbal design is not mine, I got it from rchobbysuk.co.uk, since I heard great things about it. I currently have it set up for 2 axis, but 3 axis is just as possible and I will change to it if I can design a lightweight tension folding leg system.
Likely changes: I'll probably add a hole above the ESC in the white piece of the arms to allow some prop wash to hit the ESCs. In a few weeks when my E310 set has arrived and I'm home, I'll design some more custom parts for it.
Frame: estimated weight of 400g.
Currently going to run on a 5000mAh 4S battery, but will eventually run on 6600mAh-8000mAh
Liftoff weight: approx. 2.1kg with 5000mAh battery and 2.4kg with 8000mAh battery.
Props: Can run 9.4 inch props and smaller, 10in untested and I may make slightly larger arms for them.
FC: Naza M v2, possibly APM2.5 if I can find all the wires for it and get it set up.
Power system: E310 of course, however the non-E310 version can run any 16x19 mounting pattern motors, and if your ESCs are 9.6mm or less, they can fit in between the frame layers.
My apologies for the picture quality, screenshots are unreliable...Also, it's completely designed in Tinkercad, so there may be some unexplained lines in the pictures where Tinkercad is glitching from such a large model, made up of thousands of geometric shapes combined.

[loganj13]

Here are the other few pictures.

[bigMouse]

Nice bit of work! I like to see other peoples creations, especially when you have obviously put a lot of thought into it!

Will be interesting to see how well the arms survive a rough'ish landing!
Think the single 5000mAh 4S is a pretty good choice!

Yes also like the captive nut idea, I was going to try this with T nuts but never got around to it!

[loganj13]

Thanks! I hope the arms will hold up well since the two layers will be connected through the standoffs by I'm thinking 6 or 8 screws. The top piece is acrylic plastic, which is more brittle and stiff but much stronger than PLA. The hope is the combination of the two locked together will be pretty tough . Anyways I'm almost there, LEDs came a few days ago and E310 set comes Tuesday. Then its just finishing printing and soldering!