Building a DIY REAPER Drone... Ended Badly

this is an entirely DIY drone with over a two meter wingspan it can fly itself completely autonomously or at least it used to when people think of drones they usually think of one of two things quadcopters or this literally if you search drones on Google these are the two things that pop up this plane is called the MQ-9 Reaper and I think it looks really cool but something tells me I'm not going to be able to just go fly one so as I mentioned before this drone is completely DIY and uses mostly things like laser cut wood and foam board as well as some 3D printing of course this project served as a great opportunity for me to learn how to design for laser cutting the first thing I tackled was the wood frame I used quarter inch plywood for this and made the wood pieces as minimal as possible to reduce weight I think ideally you would use something like balsa wood for this but this really cheap plywood is still pretty lightweight and it's so much easier to get both the fuselage and Wing structures are made from a series of ribs and spars which can then get covered later in foam board assembling the wood structures is actually really satisfying because it's just a big puzzle once you have everything cut out that is so satisfying the wings get held together and attached to the fuselage using some carbon fiber tubes this should make them easily removable but keep everything very rigid next up was covering the outside of the Wings and foam board this stuff is great it's lightweight and it makes building RC planes really easy it also laser Cuts super nicely which means you don't have to spend time with a ruler an exacto knife cutting out complex shapes that said if you don't have a laser cutter you can still totally cut this out no problem and even on the laser cut Parts there's still a lot of trimming and beveling needed on the trailing Edge and seams of the wing I added this fiber reinforced tape this stuff doesn't really look the best but it should help the wing last longer using this combination of wood and spars and foam allows me to build Wings quickly but still have a proper airfoil shape to the wing the surface of the fuselage is also made out of foam board but it's made out of several smaller pieces to make everything easier to assemble and to attach everything I used the king of all tools hot glue for some of the parts of the plane with more complex features I opted to use 3D printed parts for this I used lightweight pla which ended up cutting the weight of those parts in half compared to normal pla I also use this lightweight pla for the ailerons which meant I could build some really nice hinges into the wings so everything Blends together I was really happy with how these turned out at the rear of the plane there is a detail section which acts as a Rudder and elevator these are also just made out of foam board and then they slot into this 3D printed piece the control surfaces on the v-tail are also just made out of foam board and I use tape to reinforce the hinges if you guys are interested in seeing more updates on projects like this I recently started posting stuff on Instagram so go check that out I even have a sneak peek for a future project already posted to power this thing I'm using a brushless motor that is definitely Overkill but I just had it lying around so I went ahead and used it I paired it with a 9-inch three blade prop which should give this plane plenty of thrust finishing the parts up with a paint job means we're almost ready to go however there's something we're forgetting Electronics this thing has to be able to control itself somehow I've got servos embedded in the wings and tail which will move the control surfaces but it needs to get those commands from somewhere and that's where this mess comes in this is a matech 405 flight controller and I'm running RG plane on it there's an RC receiver which communicates my RC transmitter so I can give it commands as well as a Telemetry radio and GPS all these things together mean that the plane should be able to fly itself in theory at least now if you're working on a project like this or really any DIY project you might want to check out the sponsor today's video PCB way they offer high quality pcbs at really affordable prices as well as a lot of other stuff like CNC Machining and metal 3D printing if you don't need metal Parts they can also print them at a high performance Plastics like nylon with processes like mjf that are hard to get on the hobby scale their website makes it really easy to get a quote and I've used their services in the past and always had good results so check them out using the link in the description below now let's get back to building a plane so at this point the plane is done and should be ready to fly the next morning I headed out to my local RC field only to be greeted by a thick layer of fog so obviously we had to wait until the fog went away so instead we went and picked up coffee which is an absolute essential and then I flew my mavic mini up above the fog and it actually turned out looking pretty cool after about an hour waiting around the fog was finally gone and it was looking like we could fly so should be about ready to go here take this guy out of here take off a passion [Music] I initially tried to take the plane off but it wasn't rolling very well in the high grass and the propeller has very little ground clearance so it was just hitting the ground so instead I just hand launched it [Music] this thing flew really well not to mention it looked awesome in the air [Music] okay after flying the plane around for a little bit and doing some basic tuning I decided to bring it in for a landing oh landing gear took a beating we now have a much lower profile landing gears so this pretty tough Landing definitely caused some damage but luckily a little tape can fix just about anything tape is an essential Aerospace tool everyone knows next I wanted to test some of the autonomous features in RG pilot this wasn't too hard and I just had to set a couple parameters on the second flight I once again hand launched it and then flew it up to about 200 feet before putting it in loiter mode in loiter mode the autopilot tries to maintain the same altitude but flies in circles around a point [Music] after about 30 minutes of flying the battery was getting pretty low so I once again brought it in for a landing this time since there was no landing gear to take the impact the prop hit the ground really hard and the whole motor ripped off so a few fixes were definitely needed once I got back to the house I took the plan apart and found that some of the wood and super glued joints had failed luckily I could just recut these pieces and this time use tons of epoxy to hold everything together and zip ties of course no job is complete without a few good zip ties while I had the plant apart I also swapped out the ESC for one that was rated for six cell batteries this will allow me to put big six cell batteries in here and hopefully get a longer flight time the next day that we had good flying weather I loaded everything back up into the car and went to go fly it again all right so we got the bigger batteries now we got these Big 4 000 milliamp hour six cell batteries and we're going to put this thing up and just do big loops and we'll see how long it flies because of how heavy the big battery in the front was the plane ended up being pretty nose heavy so I added another battery behind the wing which should hopefully balance this out this added a little more weight than I wanted but I guess it could help the flight time all right oh that's not good [Applause] I don't think that's flying again today that's so bad back to the drawing board I guess they ask you how you are you just have to say that you're fine when you're not really fine go survey the wreckage hey some parts are still good you know it's really just a couple cosmetics fixes really well so yeah at this point this thing needs some serious rebuilding if it's ever going to fly again I think what caused this to crash was that it's just a little too heavy and it was also very nose heavy even though I put that battery behind the wing and my throw also kind of sucked maybe I'll rebuild this in a future video but it seems like it definitely needs to be built out of something more robust maybe I'll use some foam or something like that let me know if you guys have any suggestions on ways to improve the design it sucks that this project ended in a crash but you know that's how it goes sometimes anyway thanks for watching subscribe for more and I'll see you guys in the next one thank you [Music]

Channel: Michael Rechtin

Views: 1,040,236

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Id: X-Q08HQq7fM

Length: 9min 19sec (559 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2023