Daily Archives: 6/10/2013

3D Printed Motor mounts for Mark H.’s 1 Hour Quadcopter

A few days ago I pointed at Mark Harrison’s Instructable on a 1 Hour Quadcopter. I thought it was cool, not so much because it could be built by him in an hour, but because it showed that quadcopters are actually not all that complex, and you might expect to be able to build one yourself. As I was mulling this over, I thought it might be nice to design and 3D print some motor mounts, just as I did for the Axon. So, I spent about 20 minutes tinkering an OpenSCAD version together, and came up with this:

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And it took about 24 minutes and 4 meters of PLA filament to print:

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The blackish bits on the top are an artifact of the previous user printing something using black filament, which took a while to clear out. The weight of this bracket should be about 12 grams, but I printed this test with 100% infill, and I think other model changes could result in a significant reduction in overall weight (I think all 4 brackets could easily be less than 25 grams, and probably be less than 18 grams). As soon as I test this against the real motors, I’ll be putting the revised model files up for download on Thingiverse. Stay tuned!

Chris Fenton’s Amazing Electro/Mechanical computers

I remember reading about Chris Fenton’s homebrew Cray, which was impressive enough. It was implemented on a Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA board, and eventually he got a Cray assembler written. It also is neat, because it looks like a tiny Cray:

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But I wasn’t too interested in actually building one. But the gods of Internet surfing sent me back to his website today and I found two new projects of exceeding awesomeness:

The FIBIAC – an electromechanical computer



And the even more amazing, purely mechanical Turbo Encabulator:



As my only “value added” link, Chris makes reference to a book entitled “The Mechanism of Weaving”, which detailed the function of the Jacquard looms that were the predecessors of punch cards and early mechanical computers. His edition was published in 1895, but it turns out you can get an online copy from the Internet Archive. Very neat.