As part of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME) Design team, we participated in a competition for a 3D printed FPV drone. I designed the blade guards, camera mount, and helped streamline the chassis.

2024 Competition

Blade Guards:

The blade guards are secured to the arms by means of sitting in between the motor mount and the arm, being sandwiched by the four M3 motor mounting screws. In this way, the blade guards do not need their own mounting provisions, making the drone both more simple, and lighter. This design also allows for fairly simple change of blade guards, as they are broken easily while testing. The blade guards, even when printed with high infill rates of 65 percent and 3 outer walls, are subjected to an amount of force that breakage is almost unavoidable in the event of a collision. In this sense, making them thick enough to avoid breakage is not a good decision, adding a very significant amount of weight to the outer edges of the drone without eliminating the chance of them breaking.

Camera Mount:

This chassis is designed with a removable camera mount which is capable of adjusting the viewing angle of the FPV camera. This adjustable angle is accomplished by one of the M2 mounting points of the camera serving as the pivot for the camera angle, while the other mounting point has an arc shaped counterbored slot which allows some rotation of the camera while the M2 mounting screw is loosened. Due to the speed of the drone being directly dependent on its forward angle, it is important that different pilots have the option to change the camera angle without having to install a different camera mount. This is especially important while the pilots learn to fly, as they might learn with different speeds and paces, making an adjustable camera extremely useful.

2025 Competition

Now as a Design Team Captain for UMass ASME, we continued our participation for the competition next year.

Created and utilized Altair on drone for a lightweight design that reduced weight by ~400 grams