UPDATE: Further testing was done, along with a newer weird design: ruclips.net/video/me7NgN6lYko/видео.html === I guess we'll list weird name ideas here, will update if y'all come up with more: Q-Prop Loli-Prop Quake Prop Loop-Bone Mono-Loop Doesn't even work yet and I'm thinking of names 😆
This feels incredibly appropriate, yet somewhat insulting, hahaha. Tell you what, we'll call it that if it becomes a resounding success, otherwise I'll save my chosen channel name for when a design is really, really awesome 😅
I'm just wondering when the curious guys from RUclips will move science and engineering better than the academy and R&D xD. Great video, looking forward to what you will do in the sequel !
Cool concept, and good to see you back on RUclips! But damn that FPV view is disorienting with all that wobble. I bet you could sell that lens to Christopher Nolan for some weird practical-VFX shot that he has imagined, since he hates using digital effects. It would be perfect for the early moments of an LSD experience if he did like an MK-Ultra movie after Oppenheimer, haha. You just need to mount the lens to like... an electric toothbrush or something to replicate the vibrations of the prop and motor. I think I'm actually more captivated by how extreme that video distortion is than I am about anything to do with the props, lol. Your yard looks so chill and relaxing too, that loud FPV buzz has gotta kill the vibe. One day I think you'll find the solution, and I'll be waiting for the video.
Haha, the distortion is just rolling shutter mixed with vibration, effectively any camera with a slow-enough sensor read-out and high enough vibrations could get a similar effect. Semi-related, I can't remember from where, but I believe there was a movie shot with a shaky camera effect, probably a war film or something, where they just attached a heavy weight to an electric drill and tied that to the camera to get it shaking, haha. And yes, the buzz does kill the vibe, but I suppose I've lived in the same place for 20+ years that the peaceful nature of my semi-dilapidated garden isn't as apparent to myself as it is to others. Must remember to not take that for granted, good reminder actually.
@@STRIKINGFPVOh, I understand how easy it is - before the pandemic my office looked out onto a completely deserted beach lined with palm trees, and I could literally look through the gaps in the floor boards and see pure white sand a meter under me, and I definitely took that for granted. That summer I was forced to move miles away to Yangon, a big city, and through the pandemic and now this military coup I've been trapped in the city, so that little touch of nature around your yard with those great big hills stretching into the distance looks like paradise to me at this point. But we all take for granted the things that seem like an automatic each day, if we didn't than humans would get distracted and absorbed by every slightly nice thing in life and never get anything done, like a bunch of stoners basically, haha.
Nice exploratory video on the Q-props. It would probably be interesting to see if the salt remelting method to strengthen the core of 3d printed object would have beneficial effects in your designs to combat centrifugal force and layer adhesion.
You know what, I had heard about annealing but thought it was only really viable with PLA, but after your suggestion I found a video of someone using floured salt to anneal with PETG and it looks very promising indeed. I'll have to go to my nearest baking supply and see if they've got the stuff, but it's very tempting. I'd say a potential issue could be packing in the salt tightly around and under the blade/loop structures, but maybe some vigorous shaking and packing might do the trick. Would love to see if it also improves the surface of the blades, perhaps smoothing it. I don't think I'll be trying this soon soon since I have some work coming up that'll eat my time a bit, but definitely would like to try eventually, cheers for reminding me.
@@STRIKINGFPV very glad to hear your response and happy that it could help in your future videos. I agree with your concerns about the packing around the loop, maybe could help if you scale up the model a bit then you would be able to sand it or polish it, while making it a bit tougher during the remelting process. Otherwise you can use dichloromethane or some epoxy layers to smooth the surface at the end. Looking forward to your next tests!!! It is great to see such dedication in these projects!
@@LochnessFPV Wish I could be more dedicated, but ya'know, life and work and all that, haha. In doing more testing though, I can say that my Q props were indeed not balanced. Might be a quirk in how the printer prints that results in the solid counterweight part having less material than it should, despite 100% infill and 10 perimeters, hehe. My current plan is to dip the counterweight part in maybe like nail varnish or car touch-up paint to make it heavier. Also did a bi-loop with counterweight which is more balanced fresh off the printer, but could also use a bit of extra meat on the counterweight side. Alas, three days of production work coming up so it all goes on standby again 😬
Welcome back. Nice garden by the way. Check the flex of the whole loop as opposed to just the end. For test puposes, maybe make it thicker? Isn't there some sort of stress test function in fusion? I seem to recall something, what, I have no idea...
I did go thicker with the last iteration and still blew-up, haha. I have another sneaky suspicion that the instability is from the fact that one side flexes and the counterweight side doesn't, so it might be balanced when stationary but loses its balance when spun-up. Still, gonna' do the flight test without prop guards on the spare drone first, if more explosions then I'll experiment with altering the COG towards the counterweight side.
@@STRIKINGFPV At that point, put a motor on a stick and see what happens with as slow of a frame rate that you can manage. You may be right on the balance being thrown off too.
My camera can do 120fps in Full HD, my plan for the next video is to use that and get close-ups of the drone during hover, instead of doing a wide shot with me sitting in it as well. But 120fps isn't that high in the context of spinning props, then there's rolling shutter to contend with. We'll see how it turns out, hehe.
@STRIKINGFPV looking forward to it. To get higher frames, I am willing to bet that upscaling a lower resolution will be easily forgiven. DaVinci resolve does a good job of it, not sure about premier, might crash and lose the footage.
@@tobins6800 Haha, it's funny because for the longest time DaVinci was the one that kept doing weird things to me. Premiere was no saint, occasionally would crash but with frequent saving it usually did fine and in terms of workflow I'm really fast with it. This and the integration with Adobe Audition and After Effects allowed me to get decent audio and do fancy 3D text in my flying videos. This being said, I recently got a new laptop and now they're both on par with one another in terms of smoothness of workflow, and neither really crash anymore. I did a test video recently on my personal channel, using footage I shot of a rainforest up in Northern Thailand, and it was a dream to colour grade, now that I wasn't getting slow-downs or crashes that were prevalent on my old laptop. This gave me the confidence to completely do this latest video in DaVinci, which is why the colour correction looks different from my other ones. Not to plug a dying personal channel, but if you dig calm rainforest vibes then maybe you'd appreciate that video, haha: ruclips.net/video/am-i5j4b_ms/видео.html
It would be really interesting to see if you could print your props in resin. Being significantly smoother , they might be more efficient and and stronger due to lack of layers.
Oh they totally would be, but quite a few others have done so and discovered that they're quite brittle, more likely to explode than FDM printing it seems. They'd certainly be more balanced, however, so there's that benefit. I unfortunately don't have a resin printer nor do I have immediate access to one for rapid prototyping and tweaking of settings. It's definitely a printer I'd like to have eventually, but aside from cost I don't really have an appropriate place to keep it considering the smell they give-off. Wish-list, hehe.
@@STRIKINGFPV Yeah, resin printers are stinky :( They're not particularly bad smelling, but give you headache quickly. Don't ask how I know:) I was mixing siraya tech resins - blu and tenacious, the latter is a flexible one, so it makes the thing less brittle. Will try it once I'll get components for a drone. BTW, not an ad, but I literally today found out that pcbway offers a printing service, and among other things they can print in sls (not in sla) with pa12 nylon. that thing is rumored to be very strong/durable. would be interesting to see how they behave. I'm not on very good terms with fusion360 so it'll take quite a while for me to replicate your work. but I'll try:) Anyways, thanks for sharing the knowledge, it's very helpful!:)
Good question! Actually one of the earlier V1 testers of my printed toroidal designs noticed that angle mode often went crazy, but acro mode seems to be more stable. Almost all my attempted flights I start off in angle mode without air, then I try angle with air mode, then eventually try just acro mode. All attempts failed, as you can see 🤣
@@STRIKINGFPV 😊 never a failure when success is achieved in knowledge. 🤙🏻 guessing you're assessment of stretch is a grand hypothesis. best left maybe to someone else to "disprove". NEXT 😁
Can you just bench test the props with a motor in a desktop mount? Maybe mount the motor on a rod that’s sitting in a tube sleeve for guidance to have it lift up without navigation issues.
I've thought about bench testing but there's something so visceral about watching an actual drone take-off or explode, so for now I'll stick with that 😁. If I ever get into very serious design and thrust testing, then I might considering building a proper bench test rig, but it's just a fun hobby for now.
spitballing... what about a solid mono-blade more like the wooden one on the airplane? is that even printable or way too fragile? .... ooo thinking as typing... probably not balance-able with just printed plastic and would need four perfect matches... am i still typing...
Good to keep thinking - I'm thinking the counterweight side is fine since all my exploded props simply lost the loop part, but the counter-weight side was always intact and solid-as. It's weird because I feel like I'm lying to myself about the loop warping outwards, scraping the guard and exploding from that, but there's no other explanation that seems to work in my head, unless the imbalance itself is shaking the whole drone in a way that the loop just can't hold itself up against the centrifugal force plus the additional shake. Time will tell once I test with the spare-parts drone, but I'm so worried it'll just be another prop'splosion 😬
IF THE LOOP-BONES EXPLODE DUE TO CONTACT WITH THE PROP GUARD. . . WHAT STOPS YOU FROM DESIGNING THE LOOP-BONES TO BE A BIT SMALLER? (SO THAT IT MAKES NO CONTACT WITH THE PROP GUARD UPON CENTRIFUGAL FORCES BEING APPLIED TO THE LOOP-BONE).
Well, I've since determined that the greater issue is not so much the scraping, I reckon it's the warping creating inbalance. My latest video tests two variations of the loop-bone without any prop guards, and prop-splosions still occur 😆
i dont think mono props are a good idea, even small irregularities exert a lot of instability, and in my opinion its bad design because the same surfaces area is required than biblades that have almost same effiency. toroidals are an elegant solution, but not an optimal one, the stability is a good argument, but if we find for example prop designs that generate more lift, they will also be quieter. think of birds, they dont make much sounds flying, what will also be interesting is to combine propellers with microstructure surfaces ridges like bird feathers or shark skin.
I agree with you, it's naturally unstable and even the flexing of the blade/loop side will likely cause more imbalance. I'm just hoping that the explosions are indeed from the propguard and hope that it does fly, regardless of stability (or lack thereof). Microstructure surfaces would also be very interesting, but 3D printing just wouldn't be able to pull that off I think, layer lines being too prominent - maybe resin printing, but again a few people have had difficulty with the available resins being to brittle for props. I think it would have to be some kind of post-process, or in a mass-production setting the texture would be applied directly to the mold. I'm thinking of the PlayStation 5's square circle cross triangle pattern that they have on the inside of the white plates or on the DualSense controller's surface.
@@STRIKINGFPV you could design a propeller with tubercles , if the tubercles are very fine like feathers they will have also noise dampening effect like owl wings
I think at most the only thing I can do is try turning on this "rough surface" mode in the printer slicer. But considering the surface is already rough from layer lines it might not do much. Proof that smoother is better came from MoppelMat polishing his props smooth to get good performance, so I think the physics of fine fine surface details is beyond what we could pull off with 3D printers. What might be a funny idea is to get that fine material they use for grass in diaramas, spray a production prop with adhesive and sprinkle with that grass stuff, haha. Hardly scientific, but might just be funny to see fuzzy props 🤣.
@@d4ro If we're aiming for increased performance then yes, has to be done properly. Completely out of the scope of 3D printing in this case. Even resin lacks that level of detail.
UPDATE: Further testing was done, along with a newer weird design:
ruclips.net/video/me7NgN6lYko/видео.html
===
I guess we'll list weird name ideas here, will update if y'all come up with more:
Q-Prop
Loli-Prop
Quake Prop
Loop-Bone
Mono-Loop
Doesn't even work yet and I'm thinking of names 😆
You are making yourself a master of the field. Thank you for posting.
Striking Prop, due to channel name and it striking the prop guard.
This feels incredibly appropriate, yet somewhat insulting, hahaha. Tell you what, we'll call it that if it becomes a resounding success, otherwise I'll save my chosen channel name for when a design is really, really awesome 😅
I'm just wondering when the curious guys from RUclips will move science and engineering better than the academy and R&D xD.
Great video, looking forward to what you will do in the sequel !
Cool concept, and good to see you back on RUclips! But damn that FPV view is disorienting with all that wobble. I bet you could sell that lens to Christopher Nolan for some weird practical-VFX shot that he has imagined, since he hates using digital effects. It would be perfect for the early moments of an LSD experience if he did like an MK-Ultra movie after Oppenheimer, haha. You just need to mount the lens to like... an electric toothbrush or something to replicate the vibrations of the prop and motor. I think I'm actually more captivated by how extreme that video distortion is than I am about anything to do with the props, lol.
Your yard looks so chill and relaxing too, that loud FPV buzz has gotta kill the vibe. One day I think you'll find the solution, and I'll be waiting for the video.
Haha, the distortion is just rolling shutter mixed with vibration, effectively any camera with a slow-enough sensor read-out and high enough vibrations could get a similar effect. Semi-related, I can't remember from where, but I believe there was a movie shot with a shaky camera effect, probably a war film or something, where they just attached a heavy weight to an electric drill and tied that to the camera to get it shaking, haha.
And yes, the buzz does kill the vibe, but I suppose I've lived in the same place for 20+ years that the peaceful nature of my semi-dilapidated garden isn't as apparent to myself as it is to others. Must remember to not take that for granted, good reminder actually.
@@STRIKINGFPVOh, I understand how easy it is - before the pandemic my office looked out onto a completely deserted beach lined with palm trees, and I could literally look through the gaps in the floor boards and see pure white sand a meter under me, and I definitely took that for granted. That summer I was forced to move miles away to Yangon, a big city, and through the pandemic and now this military coup I've been trapped in the city, so that little touch of nature around your yard with those great big hills stretching into the distance looks like paradise to me at this point. But we all take for granted the things that seem like an automatic each day, if we didn't than humans would get distracted and absorbed by every slightly nice thing in life and never get anything done, like a bunch of stoners basically, haha.
Nice exploratory video on the Q-props. It would probably be interesting to see if the salt remelting method to strengthen the core of 3d printed object would have beneficial effects in your designs to combat centrifugal force and layer adhesion.
You know what, I had heard about annealing but thought it was only really viable with PLA, but after your suggestion I found a video of someone using floured salt to anneal with PETG and it looks very promising indeed. I'll have to go to my nearest baking supply and see if they've got the stuff, but it's very tempting.
I'd say a potential issue could be packing in the salt tightly around and under the blade/loop structures, but maybe some vigorous shaking and packing might do the trick. Would love to see if it also improves the surface of the blades, perhaps smoothing it.
I don't think I'll be trying this soon soon since I have some work coming up that'll eat my time a bit, but definitely would like to try eventually, cheers for reminding me.
@@STRIKINGFPV very glad to hear your response and happy that it could help in your future videos. I agree with your concerns about the packing around the loop, maybe could help if you scale up the model a bit then you would be able to sand it or polish it, while making it a bit tougher during the remelting process. Otherwise you can use dichloromethane or some epoxy layers to smooth the surface at the end.
Looking forward to your next tests!!!
It is great to see such dedication in these projects!
@@LochnessFPV Wish I could be more dedicated, but ya'know, life and work and all that, haha.
In doing more testing though, I can say that my Q props were indeed not balanced. Might be a quirk in how the printer prints that results in the solid counterweight part having less material than it should, despite 100% infill and 10 perimeters, hehe. My current plan is to dip the counterweight part in maybe like nail varnish or car touch-up paint to make it heavier.
Also did a bi-loop with counterweight which is more balanced fresh off the printer, but could also use a bit of extra meat on the counterweight side.
Alas, three days of production work coming up so it all goes on standby again 😬
@@STRIKINGFPV Great, happy to wait to see further development on your projects!!
Welcome back. Nice garden by the way.
Check the flex of the whole loop as opposed to just the end. For test puposes, maybe make it thicker? Isn't there some sort of stress test function in fusion? I seem to recall something, what, I have no idea...
I did go thicker with the last iteration and still blew-up, haha.
I have another sneaky suspicion that the instability is from the fact that one side flexes and the counterweight side doesn't, so it might be balanced when stationary but loses its balance when spun-up. Still, gonna' do the flight test without prop guards on the spare drone first, if more explosions then I'll experiment with altering the COG towards the counterweight side.
@@STRIKINGFPV At that point, put a motor on a stick and see what happens with as slow of a frame rate that you can manage. You may be right on the balance being thrown off too.
My camera can do 120fps in Full HD, my plan for the next video is to use that and get close-ups of the drone during hover, instead of doing a wide shot with me sitting in it as well. But 120fps isn't that high in the context of spinning props, then there's rolling shutter to contend with. We'll see how it turns out, hehe.
@STRIKINGFPV looking forward to it. To get higher frames, I am willing to bet that upscaling a lower resolution will be easily forgiven. DaVinci resolve does a good job of it, not sure about premier, might crash and lose the footage.
@@tobins6800 Haha, it's funny because for the longest time DaVinci was the one that kept doing weird things to me. Premiere was no saint, occasionally would crash but with frequent saving it usually did fine and in terms of workflow I'm really fast with it. This and the integration with Adobe Audition and After Effects allowed me to get decent audio and do fancy 3D text in my flying videos.
This being said, I recently got a new laptop and now they're both on par with one another in terms of smoothness of workflow, and neither really crash anymore.
I did a test video recently on my personal channel, using footage I shot of a rainforest up in Northern Thailand, and it was a dream to colour grade, now that I wasn't getting slow-downs or crashes that were prevalent on my old laptop. This gave me the confidence to completely do this latest video in DaVinci, which is why the colour correction looks different from my other ones.
Not to plug a dying personal channel, but if you dig calm rainforest vibes then maybe you'd appreciate that video, haha:
ruclips.net/video/am-i5j4b_ms/видео.html
lost wax casting. use print as positive to create mold
It would be really interesting to see if you could print your props in resin. Being significantly smoother , they might be more efficient and and stronger due to lack of layers.
Oh they totally would be, but quite a few others have done so and discovered that they're quite brittle, more likely to explode than FDM printing it seems. They'd certainly be more balanced, however, so there's that benefit. I unfortunately don't have a resin printer nor do I have immediate access to one for rapid prototyping and tweaking of settings. It's definitely a printer I'd like to have eventually, but aside from cost I don't really have an appropriate place to keep it considering the smell they give-off. Wish-list, hehe.
@@STRIKINGFPV Yeah, resin printers are stinky :( They're not particularly bad smelling, but give you headache quickly. Don't ask how I know:) I was mixing siraya tech resins - blu and tenacious, the latter is a flexible one, so it makes the thing less brittle. Will try it once I'll get components for a drone. BTW, not an ad, but I literally today found out that pcbway offers a printing service, and among other things they can print in sls (not in sla) with pa12 nylon. that thing is rumored to be very strong/durable. would be interesting to see how they behave. I'm not on very good terms with fusion360 so it'll take quite a while for me to replicate your work. but I'll try:)
Anyways, thanks for sharing the knowledge, it's very helpful!:)
I always enjoyed your Toroidal endeavor - curious what happens here 3:03 😊
Good question! Actually one of the earlier V1 testers of my printed toroidal designs noticed that angle mode often went crazy, but acro mode seems to be more stable. Almost all my attempted flights I start off in angle mode without air, then I try angle with air mode, then eventually try just acro mode. All attempts failed, as you can see 🤣
@@STRIKINGFPV 😊 never a failure when success is achieved in knowledge. 🤙🏻 guessing you're assessment of stretch is a grand hypothesis. best left maybe to someone else to "disprove".
NEXT 😁
Can you just bench test the props with a motor in a desktop mount? Maybe mount the motor on a rod that’s sitting in a tube sleeve for guidance to have it lift up without navigation issues.
I've thought about bench testing but there's something so visceral about watching an actual drone take-off or explode, so for now I'll stick with that 😁. If I ever get into very serious design and thrust testing, then I might considering building a proper bench test rig, but it's just a fun hobby for now.
spitballing... what about a solid mono-blade more like the wooden one on the airplane? is that even printable or way too fragile? .... ooo thinking as typing... probably not balance-able with just printed plastic and would need four perfect matches... am i still typing...
Good to keep thinking - I'm thinking the counterweight side is fine since all my exploded props simply lost the loop part, but the counter-weight side was always intact and solid-as.
It's weird because I feel like I'm lying to myself about the loop warping outwards, scraping the guard and exploding from that, but there's no other explanation that seems to work in my head, unless the imbalance itself is shaking the whole drone in a way that the loop just can't hold itself up against the centrifugal force plus the additional shake.
Time will tell once I test with the spare-parts drone, but I'm so worried it'll just be another prop'splosion 😬
@@STRIKINGFPV love the continuous experimentation and even more-so the fact you're sharing in the process 👏
IF THE LOOP-BONES EXPLODE DUE TO CONTACT WITH THE PROP GUARD. . . WHAT STOPS YOU FROM DESIGNING THE LOOP-BONES TO BE A BIT SMALLER? (SO THAT IT MAKES NO CONTACT WITH THE PROP GUARD UPON CENTRIFUGAL FORCES BEING APPLIED TO THE LOOP-BONE).
Well, I've since determined that the greater issue is not so much the scraping, I reckon it's the warping creating inbalance. My latest video tests two variations of the loop-bone without any prop guards, and prop-splosions still occur 😆
lolipop prop
Loliprop maybe? I dig it, haha
Drumstick prop since it looks kind of like a Chicken/Turkey drumstick.
The turducken drumstick?
😆😆😆
i dont think mono props are a good idea, even small irregularities exert a lot of instability, and in my opinion its bad design because the same surfaces area is required than biblades that have almost same effiency. toroidals are an elegant solution, but not an optimal one, the stability is a good argument, but if we find for example prop designs that generate more lift, they will also be quieter. think of birds, they dont make much sounds flying, what will also be interesting is to combine propellers with microstructure surfaces ridges like bird feathers or shark skin.
I agree with you, it's naturally unstable and even the flexing of the blade/loop side will likely cause more imbalance. I'm just hoping that the explosions are indeed from the propguard and hope that it does fly, regardless of stability (or lack thereof).
Microstructure surfaces would also be very interesting, but 3D printing just wouldn't be able to pull that off I think, layer lines being too prominent - maybe resin printing, but again a few people have had difficulty with the available resins being to brittle for props. I think it would have to be some kind of post-process, or in a mass-production setting the texture would be applied directly to the mold. I'm thinking of the PlayStation 5's square circle cross triangle pattern that they have on the inside of the white plates or on the DualSense controller's surface.
@@STRIKINGFPV you could design a propeller with tubercles , if the tubercles are very fine like feathers they will have also noise dampening effect like owl wings
I think at most the only thing I can do is try turning on this "rough surface" mode in the printer slicer. But considering the surface is already rough from layer lines it might not do much. Proof that smoother is better came from MoppelMat polishing his props smooth to get good performance, so I think the physics of fine fine surface details is beyond what we could pull off with 3D printers.
What might be a funny idea is to get that fine material they use for grass in diaramas, spray a production prop with adhesive and sprinkle with that grass stuff, haha. Hardly scientific, but might just be funny to see fuzzy props 🤣.
@@STRIKINGFPV I think the microstructure must be accurate to work and not fuzzy or random but smooth and streamlined on the microscopic level
@@d4ro If we're aiming for increased performance then yes, has to be done properly. Completely out of the scope of 3D printing in this case. Even resin lacks that level of detail.