I decided to use Autodesk Fusion 360 as my main CAD tool for this semester. It has a free multi-year license for college students, and it's one of the industry standard tools. It's capabilities include parametric design, and both 2D and 3D modeling.

For my final project, which is supposed to incorporate everything that we will learn this semester, from electronics to machining, I'm tentatively planning to build a quadcopter. I'll have to do machining to make the body of the drone, some circuit work to make the motors, and learn communications/networking in order to control the quadcopter using radio signals. It's a challenging project, but it's been done for this class before.

As a primary resource for this project, I'm using this website: http://beginnerflyer.com/build-a-drone. The dimensions of my frame are going to be 50cm X 50 cm, which is in the middle range of typical drone sizes.

The components that I've made so far that are going to become part of my final quadcopter are the propellers and the tilt sensor. I plan to make the propellers using molding techniques. In addition, I plan to modify the accelerometer from the input devices week and use it as a tilt sensor. This tilt sensor will allow the quadcopter to take corrective action if it begins to tilt too much in any direction.

I plan to use the techniques I learned from the composites week to make a lightweight but strong body for my quadcopter.

I'll continue to update this page as my drone design progresses.