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Products that do what I made a 3D printed VTOL drone does
I made this 130 mile capable VTOL drone in only 90 days. It can fly for 3 hours on a single charge. That would make it one of the longest range and endurance 3D printed VTOLs in the world. This is the thing I'm most proud of building to date! Before this project, I was a total CAD, 3D printing and aerodynamic modeling beginner. I had only built and flown one VTOL before. SPECS Wingspan: 3.9 ft (1200 mm) Length: 2.5 ft (770 mm) Weight: 5.6 lb (2.55kg) Airframe: foaming PLA (Bambu PLA-Aero) and PETG structural parts printed on A1 printer, CFRP booms and spars Battery: Li-ion silicon anode…
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2021 · github.com
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Here's a "behind-the-scenes" look at my development of a cool sensor during my PhD (electrical engineering). This sensor is only about 1/3 of my total research for my degree and took about a year. I've been on HN for a while now and I've seen my fair share of posts about the woes of pursuing a PhD. Now that I'm done with mine I wanna share some anecdotal evidence that doing a PhD can actually be enjoyable (not necessarily easy) and also be doable in 3 years. When I started I knew I didn't want to work on something that would never leave the lab or languish in a dissertation PDF no one…
2024 · paulbupejr.com
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Hey HN! A few years ago someone kept trying to steal my motorcycle, so I decided to make a small camera with really long battery life to catch them. The hardware/software is totally open source, but the companion app only supports macOS currently. (I'm a big fan of native apps, and didn't want to block releasing on Linux/Windows support.) I wrote some blog posts about the process: PCB design: https://toaster.llc/blog/pcb Enclosure design: https://toaster.llc/blog/enclosure Image pipeline:…
2024 · toaster.llc
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3D printing is such a fascinating field of technology, so a couple months ago, I decided to take a deep dive and learn how they actually work! This took me to one of my very first PCB projects, a small, cheap, 3D printer motherboard. While it's not the most cutting edge board, I learned a lot and I fully documented my process designing it (https://github.com/KaiPereira/Cheetah-MX4-Mini/blob/master/J...), so other people can learn from my mistakes! It runs off of an STM32H743 MCU, has 4 TMC stepsticks with UART/SPI configurations,…
Dec 2025 · github.com
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Go big, and 3D print massive parts for you next project
2018
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I’m building a robot that can track nerf darts and shoot them out of the air. I’ve worked on other projects in robotics and object tracking (perception for self driving cars), but this has a whole different set of challenges. Nerf rival rounds travel at over 100 feet per second and shooting them out of the air requires aiming systems that are precise to less than half the width of a human hair and timing precision of 600 times faster than the blink of an eye. This is the first part of the series of me building the project (and my first video!) so I’d love to hear what you think!
2022 · youtube.com
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(This was previously submitted as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2246856) The Ravenna Ultra-Low-Altitude Vehicle is a backyard rocketship treehouse nestled in the Seattle neighborhood of Ravenna. Click the link to see a demo video (http://rocket.jonh.net). The hexagonal treehouse is about 6.5 feet (2 meters) across at its widest point. The frame is welded mild steel with riveted aluminum siding. It contains nearly 800 LEDs forming dozens of numeric displays spread across 14 control panels, each with an acrylic face laser-cut and etched with labels such as…
2023 · rocket.jonh.net
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We have pegboards and plywood all over our apartment, and I had an idea to make a tiny pegboard for my kid, Oli. So I naturally cut the wood, drilled in the holes, sat down at the computer to open Fusion 360 and spend an hour or two drawing the pieces by hand. Then I looked at the rough sketch Oli and I had made together, took a photo of it, pasted it into Codex, and gave it just two dimensions: the holes are 40mm apart and the pegs are 8mm wide. To my surprise, 5 minutes later my 3D printer was heating up and printing the first set. I ran it a few times to tune the dimensions for ideal fit,…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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2017 · michaelfogleman.com
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I got pretty good at (and very addicted to) the lunar lander game from a few days ago... so I decided to make an autopilot for the lander based on what I felt like was the best strategy! Now I can have perfect landings every time without lifting a finger :D Writing the autopilot code was a lot more fun than I expected! It felt a bit like programming a robot. Source code: https://github.com/szhu/lunar-lander-autopilot Original lander HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35032506
2023 · szhu.github.io
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Struts, nodes, and pins are reversibly assembled into fully 3D printed lattices, trusses, and tree-like structures spanning up to a few meters. I used the system to build a stand for an overhead table lamp which supports a ~1 m cantilevered arm using a tensioned floor-to-ceiling column. If you want to give it a try, find the *.stl files at the bottom of the page; figure ~1 kg of PLA and ~1 day of print time per meter of box truss; pay attention to print orientation; plz respect the license; and definitely print the pin trimming jig.
2025 · zachfred.in
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