Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Hangar 2: 01 – What is a Tricopter?”.
Hello and welcome back to maker hanger, my name is lucas, weekley and last season i introduced you to electric remote, controlled flight. I taught you all the basics behind how the electronic components worked and how they work together in an rc airplane. Then i showed you how to build your first remote, controlled airplane that i designed called the maker trainer. Well, this season we’re going to be building on that knowledge, as i show you how to make a tricopter and another maker trainer, we will be selling hardware kits this season for both of these aircraft. That means for the tricopter you’ll get all the laser cut frame. Parts every nut, bolt standoff, zip tie and velcro strap to complete your build. All you’ll have to supply.
Is your electronics, your flight controller board and radio equipment for the maker trainer 2. The kit will include the motor mount the nuts and bolts to hold on the motor. The control horns, linkages and easy. Connectors you’ll still have to supply your own foam and electronics, but all in all, this is going to be a very inexpensive and fun to fly airplane links to where you can buy.
The kits are available in the description, along with all the electronics and additional materials. You’Ll need to complete these aircrafts so check those out and order yours now, so you can get started with your build as the build videos come out in today’s episode, we’ll be talking about what a tricopter is and what you can possibly use it for, and also We’Ll get into more details about the maker, hanger tricopter kit, so let’s get started, [ Applause ], so i’m pretty sure you’ve all heard about multicopters, which are more commonly known as drones in the eyes of the media and government organizations. Dry captures technically fall into this category, along with the more common quadcopter, quadcopters and tricopters originated about the same time, and a very influential person in the development of the tricopter was david vindistal. He did a lot of work with multicopters even before there were flight controller boards and other technologies that we have today, and he shared his experiences with others so that they could learn and develop more quickly. David would put a gopro camera on his tricopter and take beautiful videos of all the places that he went to and that’s actually what inspired me to get into multicopters in the first place.
So i built my first tricopter in 2010 and i sourced all the parts myself and got the frame laser cut out of acrylic. This is where the saying failure is always an option is definitely true. I didn’t get many flights out of this tricopter, but i did learn a lot. I built several more tricopters over the years and got a few that flew really well, and i did a lot of video work with them and had a lot of fun as well. The reason you probably haven’t heard about tricopters is because, as multicopters in general became more popular and more and more people were building them, quadcopters were just simpler and easier to build, even though tricopters do have some advantages that i’ll talk about later.
So what makes a tricopter different from a quadcopter? Well, as you can probably tell by the name a tricopter has three motors while a quadcopter has four, a tricopter’s motors are usually separated by 120 degrees, where quadcopter’s motors are separated by 90 degrees. This makes tricopters great for video because you can place the camera really close to the body and still have no propellers in the view of the camera. Also, because of the layout of the motors quadcopters have to rely on counter rotating propellers to be able to fly at all. However, a tricopter can have all the same propellers because it has a mechanism in the back that tilts the motor to counter the torque imbalance.
Okay, because a quadcopter and a tricopter have different motor layouts, they fly differently, and this is very true. A tricaptor has more fluid flight characteristics, while the quadcopter is more stable but more robotic, because there’s a single motor for each axis of control on the tricopter, you get more natural movements than if you had multiple motors doing multiple things. Because of this, when a tricopter is in forward flight and you go to bank pitch and yaw, it feels and looks like an airplane, but when you slow it down, you can still hover like a helicopter. The tail servo has a lot to do with this, as well with the quadcopter.
The controller board has to figure out the precise rotation for each of the motors to create the proper torque imbalance to yaw the aircraft, because this is controlled by the controller board. You can get very robotic movements, so if you yaw and then let go of the stick, the aircraft will stop abruptly for video work. This makes it very noticeable. That’S a quadcopter or other aerial vehicle and can be distracting for some video projects with the tricopter.
The motor in the back can tilt, which does the exact same thing as the quadcopter did only in a mechanical way. This means, when you let go of the stick. The motor takes time to get back to where it was when it was hovering. This gives a slow stop every single time and gives you a little bit of overshoot, which makes it look more natural and kind of like if a human was moving the camera and also because the motor in the back can tilt.
You can get much higher. Yaw speeds than if you were just trying to slow down some motors to get torque roll okay. So why would you want a tricopter? Well, they are a lot of fun to fly if you just want to do stunts and acrobatics with a multicopter, but, like i said before, they’re great for video too, because the motors are so far apart, you don’t get any propellers in your video and because of The dedicated motors and the tail servo in the back, you get nice fluid movements. The tricopter is great for chasing things hovering around and depending on your flight controller board, it can be just as stable as a quadcopter or any other aerial vehicle.
The maker trainer tricopter kit is designed around makers like you, it’s made of wood, which might not be the first material to pop into your mind when building an aircraft. But wood has a lot of advantages in this situation. First off it’s very hackable. You can do whatever you want with it, because it’s very easy to drill holes into and cut different shapes out of, to make it your own plus. Wood is a natural vibration absorber and, if you’re planning on doing video work, vibrations are your enemy because they can ruin perfectly good shots. The body of the frame was also designed, with makers in mind, a lot of tricopters that i’ve built or seen have very little bodies. This makes it very difficult to change things after the fact, because your controller board, wiring and other things you put on the tricopter – are covering up the nuts and bolts that are needed to get to to disassemble and reassemble the frame with this design, even with large Format, controller boards. There is not a single nut or bolt that’s being overlapped by something else. This means you also have plenty of room to add whatever you want from video transmitters to bomb droppers to anything you can imagine to put on your tricopter like we talked about before the arms on a regular tricopter are 120 degrees. Apart now in this design, the arms in the front have a slightly larger angle of about 150 degrees.
This means the arms can be shortened so that the tricopter is more agile, there’s still no propellers. In the view of the camera, like i said before, the kit includes all the hardware: you’ll need to assemble it from nuts and bolts all the way to the zip ties to secure your wires and the velcro straps to hold on your battery. The kit also includes a wire rope, vibration absorber, which will pretty much take out all vibrations. Even if the propellers are unbalanced.
A carbon hinge is used in the tail mechanism, which gives a very strong and very smooth bond between the motor and the frame. And, of course, this kit includes all the hardware to link your servo to the moving motor assembly and finally, like most tricopters the front. Two arms fold neatly next to the back: boom for transportation and storage, there’s also a built-in locking mechanism, so the arms don’t fold back accidentally during flight. All in all, this kit has a ton of features for its price. It would make a great project for anyone wanting to get into multicopters or aerial photography in the next episode. I’Ll show you how to assemble the frame and get your tricopter ready to install the electronics i’ll see you then, thanks for watching .