Fixed arms or folding ones? One maker’s printed prototypes put the pleasure of designing centre stage. Plus a tiny camera-positioning project to follow, and two whoop owners’ less glamorous bench moments.
Published by Unmanned Tech
A frame with your own answers built in
Designing your own frame is an inviting rabbit hole: where should the wires go, what should fold, and how small can the whole thing become? If that sounds like half the fun rather than homework, u/AudiblyTacit’s fixed and folding printed prototypes are worth a look. The appeal starts before the maiden flight: a shape on a screen becomes something you can assemble.
The maker describes the project as a fun problem to solve in CAD—computer-aided design. That is a perfectly good reason to build something. Not every hobby project needs to arrive with a business case and a carbon-fibre rival to defeat.
Both designs are intended for freestyle; the compact version’s arms fold into the body. The maker is planning for up to 3-inch props on that folding frame. There are smaller details to enjoy, too: covers over wire routes, and flexible TPU bumpers intended to protect the motors. These are the choices that make following someone’s design more interesting than simply reading a parts list.
There is a pleasingly stubborn packaging problem underneath it all. The creator wants to shrink the design further, but says board size and space for wiring are getting in the way. The wires, inconsiderately, still need somewhere to live.
For the weight-watchers, the maker reports 65 g for the folding PCTG/TPU frame, 97 g for the fixed PCTG/TPU version and 82 g for the fixed PA12-CF/TPU version. Those figures include printed parts and hardware, not electronics or batteries; they are not a controlled comparison of the plastics.
This is a bench-stage discovery, not a flight recommendation. The post says electronics are still to be installed, and the creator wants to fly the frames before sharing files, with vibration among the open questions. For now, follow it for the design decisions—not a ready-to-print, proven freestyle build.
Mighty: movement tracking meets the map
Estimating how you have moved and knowing where you are on a map are different jobs. Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) combines camera images with motion-sensor measurements to estimate movement relative to a starting point. That makes it useful to explore where GPS is unavailable, such as indoors.
Mighty creator u/twokiloballs says the existing VIO struggles when a drone flies too high, and is developing a map-based positioning mode to locate the drone against onboard maps. The maker says users will need to load their own map before flight. The existing Mighty VIO board is listed at just 33 × 30 mm and 10 g by its manufacturer—a compact home for an interesting robotics project.
Keep the two stages separate: the maker says the board is already for sale, while the map-based positioning mode remains in development. There is no independently verified flight-performance envelope in the material inspected. An engineering project to follow, then, not a plug-in GPS replacement for your quad.
Tiny whoops, full-sized frustration
u/VincentLaw_6 reports an Air75 frame broken on its first flight. Separately, u/Sir_Giraffe161 reports destroying two props during removal from their own whoop, whose model is unconfirmed. Two different owners, two dispiriting interruptions to the fun. Worth a sympathetic browse: these are discussion links, not repair instructions.
What would you change first in a frame of your own: the fold, the wire routing, or something nobody else seems to make?
