In the past couple years there has been quite a bit of activity into r&d of tiny insect/drone/ornithopter type vehicles. Two intriguing designs I've been following are Harvard's RoboBee and Cornell's Ornithopter. While some designs, like Harvard's, are out of reach of the average DIYer (check out their white paper, it's awesome) the Cornell 3D printed ornithopter is attainable and I took it as a challenge to make my own. Cornell's use of 3D printing techniques makes it easy to try out and make modifications. Unfortunately they don't give out their files and they built theirs on a 3D printer that cost 100k. My work has been to model my own design off of their work, but make it using commonly available 3D printers. You can see the results below. Quickly I would like to discuss how amazing desktop 3D printers are. So far I have been able to make two versions: the first is blue and printed by my schools 3D printer (6.07 grams), the second is clear plastic and made by a Makerbot Replicator 2 (4.729 grams). For a reference point Cornell's weighed 3.89 grams. Between my first and second designs the weight of the wings has gone from 4 grams to 2.6 grams because the wing thickness went from 0.02 inches to 0.008 inches (200 microns). With the last batch of prints I also made a test wing with a 100 micron thickness that weighed 0.477 grams, multiply that by 4 (for the other half of the wing and then the second wing) and you have a total wing weight of 1.908 grams. You can see pictures of these measurements below. I have drawn up another version (you can get the files on the next page, all the parts have 'Ver3' in the title. Unfortunately I have not been able to use a Rep 2 to print again, but if my Ver3 model is printed with the 100 micron thick wings it will weigh an estimated 4.037 grams (the previous 4.729 grams minus the difference in the wings (2.6 - 1.908) grams) to make it only 0.147 grams off of Cornell's weight! I am not done with this project yet and would really love to get a design that flies, so please give me your comments and ideas! I hope to have access to a Rep 2 to print out another version of parts and update it, but I thought this project was at a stage where it was beneficial to post it. Thanks!
The majority of the parts for this design are 3d printed. The rest are as follows. Parts:
Motor - The exact one Cornell uses I coincidentally already owned and is ideal. It is a 1g pager motor with a planetary gearbox that can be found HERE.
Paperclips - Try and find very thin ones. Unless of course you happen to have some carbon fiber wire laying around like the fortunate Cornellians.
The rest are 3d printed.
Batteries - Can use anything around 3V to test and 7.4V for test flights. The arduino's 3.3V pin or a power supply can also work. Power supply is definitely the best but not needed.
Tools:
3d Printer - Pretty vital.
Drill - With some smaaaalllllll drill bits.
Pliers
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