3D printing company Sculpteo recently sat down with the CEO of Hexadrone to find out how their 3D printing services have impacted his business.
Drones and 3D printing go together like cake and ice cream, you can enjoy them separately, but when you can have both why would you only have one? 3D printing and drones first met in the maker community. Enthusiasts and hobbyists could use their 3D printers to create inexpensive, customized drones for far less money than buying commercially available parts.
But as the quality of 3D printing has improved and made small-scale manufacturing a viable option for many niche or boutique hobby businesses, 3D printing has become a vital part of the personal hobby drone industry as Hexadrone’s CEO Alexandre Labesse has discovered.
“To be authorized to fly in town, drones have to be lighter than 4 kilograms, and must be equipped with a parachute. It is essential for us to keep a stable and fluid image, but all of the existing solutions to take on aboard a high quality movie camera were far too heavy. We chose to conceive our own made to measure structure.” Labesse explained. “Thanks to 3D printing, pieces are really quickly available, which means we can test them within a few days, and make changes reactively. The material we chose allows us to create complicated designs we wouldn’t have been able to produce without additive manufacturing. The 3D printed pieces are also extremely light, are resistant and stiff enough for our needs.”
French mechatronic company Hexadrone, builds and sells drones fitted with cameras for film productions, advertising and television. They also operate a fleet of drones that can be hired to take aerial video footage or photography. They even have teams willing to travel all over the world to operate them for you. Take a look at this amazing video of one of their drones filming:
Their drones are constructed largely with commercially available components like motors, flight indicators and electronics. However they construct the chassis completely in house because they want to have complete control over the functionality of the basket and hull components. Because filming drones require manufacturers to adhere to strict weight, volume and payload capacity requirements 3D printing provides Hexarone with the freedom to push the boundaries of their designs without requiring the parts to be manufactured with traditional methods. Not only due to the process costing less, but because they get new parts so rapidly that they can test them very quickly, and get products to market faster.
Hexadrone is currently developing several products using 3D printed components, including accessories for pilots, cameramen and drone operators. And recently they brought one of the markets lightest camera baskets to market, with many of the parts ordered directly from Sculpteo.
