QuadFloat - Float Your Drone or Quad

thingiverse

I wanted to fly over some pretty deep water in situations where a rope or large jets of water might take out my quad. The quad is largely made up of junk parts, so I don't care too much about losing it. That being said, the GoPro is not something I'm willing to part with that easily and littering a lithium battery and whatnot into the lake is something I'd like to avoid. The formula I used was to weigh my quad with everything attached (including the float) in grams. Find a bottle with an equivalent number of ml (which is equivalent to cc's or cm^3) + 15% or so. A displaced ml of water weighs ~1g and I believe you'll need to displace about as many grams of water as your quad weighs plus some. If you float only as many g as your quad weighs - the quad won't float as much as touch the surface... so you'll want a little extra floatation to keep it on the surface. In my case, the nearest bottle size that was close to my limit was 23.7oz or ~700cc. I'm ignoring the water that the frame / battery / etc... displaces because I couldn't think of a reliable way to calculate that without dunking the quad. The quad is waterproofed with conformal coating, but I still don't want to put it in the water unless I need to. Both attach with zip ties / cable ties (I also used a little VHB tape to keep things from sliding around). For both - I use two for each side of the bottle (front and back) to make a flat surface for both the base of your quad and the ground for takeoff. Depending on your level of risk tolerance, there are two versions: one with space for 4 cable ties and one with space for 2 cable ties. I used a combination... plus a string attached to the bottle top as a last resort. Because I'm a wimp. Let me know if you use it!