Ryans Ducted Brushless Whoop

CHRISTMAS RELEASE!!! For you people that got a brushless whoop and may have broken your frames already! 🙂

Here is the beta version of my Ducted Brushless Whoop frame design! This is a work in progress, but I have several printed and I feel like it flies GREAT! If anyone is really interested in testing it, but doesn’t have access to a 3d printer, please direct message me! Comments and suggestions are HIGHLY WELCOME! On to the good stuff:

Features:

• Fits 26mm x 26mm AIO whoop boards
• Pusher configuration with top mounted battery for improved center of gravity.
• Ducts (obviously)
• Weighs like 14g or so? My scale isn’t precise at low measurements, 37g with Snapper7 components.
• 15×15 camera mount between front props. No props in cameras, lower profile for quad.
• Cheap, fast to print (4 hours for everything, on my slower direct drive setup), easy to swap and replace.
• Easy assembly! Should line up nicely if you print in the same plastics and same settings.
• Fairly durable, can be fixed with superglue or tape usually, or just print several spare frames…

I have been flying this around, and I believe it is smoother and more efficient than the Snapper 7 frame I originally had. I will be conducting more scientific tests once I get more parts in the mail!

I have gone through a few iterations, and arrived at this design that prints in 3 pieces that need to be superglue’d together, but lines up pretty pretty easily and kind of “clicks” together! The first iterations required more manual lining up, but adding some “alignment” rings made things easy and added negligible weight.

PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO YOUR SLICER! 0.2mm layer height and 0.4mm line width generally works best, and is what I had in mind when designing. Zoom in and see what it is doing in the preview, especially on the ducts. Cura likes to leave a weird open gap sometimes on the first layer. I “push” the duct model into the build plate 0.05mm (set z to -0.05) and that solves it for me.

I have been printing in PLA (various kinds) on my Ender 3 Pro with great results, but do check the preview for slicing to ensure the smaller features print properly.

My Cura print settings:

Main Frame:

Slice at 0.2mm, initial layer 0.3mm. 1.0mm top/bottom thickness, concentric pattern. 96% infill, cubic. Print thin walls off. 0.4mm line width.

Duct Ring: Same as main frame.

Ducts:

Spiralized (smooth contours enabled), 0.2mm layer height, 0.3mm initial layer, 0.4mm line width. 0.4mm bottom thickness, concentric. Print thin walls enabled. No infill. Remove empty first layers, BUT DOUBLE CHECK! Cura likes to put a small “gap” in the first layer for some reason. I fix this by “pushing” the model into the build plate 0.05mm before slicing, see examples.