Alternatives for the new landing gear and VOXL Flight mounts?
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If you have not ordered an m500 Drone from ModalAI recently, here is what the most recent drone looks like. Note that it is completely different from the picture on the ModalAI web page.
Essentially, ModalAI has replaced a number of older parts on the M500 drone with new 3D-printed parts. They used to use rubber isolation mounts that helped to damp IMU vibrations due to the motors, but now they use a 3D-printed solid mount that is extremely delicate at the screw hole, as you can see here where the screw hole is broken (be very careful not to over-torque your screws!):
They also have 3D-printed a mount on the bottom of the S500 frame that allows them to put the new landing gear (which used to be mounted underneath each motor). I think that ModalAI was looking for landing gear that would not get in the way of the tracking camera (in both revisions -- with the gear attached to the bottom of the motors as well as here attached to the 3D-printed mounts on the hub of the S500 frame). The problem is that the plastic gear that attaches to the 3D-printed frame is extremely fragile. On our first test flight, it cracked in half on landing:
Even when the drone lands fine, these little legs do not provide much stability to keep the drone upright. The previous iteration, although non-conventional for a drone, was much better.
We've started using more conventional S500 legs on the bottom of our m500 drones (which mount to the bottom of the drone, lifting the drone off the ground by several inches). The downside of these more conventional legs is that you can see the "toes" of them in the tracking camera, which may trick your object detection into thinking there are persistent objects in view. This is not ideal, but it is much more stable than the other options (and provides more places to handle the drone when carrying it).
I believe that ModalAI has provided CAD part files for the VOXL Flight mounts somewhere, which will allow you to replace these mounts when they inevitably break. Has anyone else come up with another option to replace these fragile 3D-printed VOXL Flight mounts? Simply being able to order the old mounts (which were rubber standoffs plus a little extra PCB) would be fine, but I'm sure someone could probably design a better 3D-printed option or even come up with a combination of elements from a local hardware store that would do a better job.
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@tpavlic did you find the CAD files?
