Micro Drone Race Gates

thingiverse

These are parts designed to make a modular kit for making drone racing gates for 100mm sized micro indoor drones. The long frame section is 12cm long and is about the longest section that can be built printing vertically, without supports, so as to minimise print time. The shorter frame section is 9cm long. Given the size limitations of the 3D printing, the idea was to connect frame sections together using the 180 degree (straight) joints, while four 90 degree corners are used in the square gate and eight 45 degree corners are used in the octagon gate. By trial and error, the three section square gate was found to be a good size for flying, being roughly three times the width of the quad, although it's certainly possible to fly through a much smaller gate. This requires 12x long frame sections, 8x 180 degree corners and 4x 90 degree corners. The octagon requires 8x long frame sections and 8x 45 degree corners, although you can make it bigger by doubling up on sections. The picture shows a gate with double short sections (2x9+2cm link = 20cm long) vertically and horizontally, so it's not a perfect octagon. The designs evolved to try and minimise printing time, but the parts for a single gate are likely to take a couple of days to print. The long frames take around 90 minutes, while the corners can be printed in about 40 minutes. The prints have been tested on an old MakerBot 2X Replicator and a Ultimaker 3, with the Makerbot being the faster of the two.