Drones are bringing the world together and in the case of Spain Labs, one of the largest making and 3D printing communities in Spain, they are also bringing together a lot of makers and 3D printing enthusiasts, all working on development of open source hardware (OSH) based drone systems integrating a majority of 3D printed parts.
The Spain Labs online community launched its Escuadron SpainLabs “division” to collaboratively build and teach how to build a range of low cost 3D printed quadcopter drones, such as the QUAD SL001 presented by community member Carlos Rodriguez Fuente in this clip.
“SpainLabs started in June of 2013”, says Spain Labos co-founder Juan Santos. “We were looking to build a website and community where makers could exchange information and publish their projects. Today, we have about 2000 registered users and more than 20000 visits per day. The 3D printing section is the most active in our forum and we estimate that includes about 600 3D printer owners, making it one of the larger 3D printing focused forums globally.”
These 3D printers, mostly Prusa i3’s, some Deltas, Core XY’s and other commercial printers. As has often become the norm in making communities, they are used along with other digital manufacturing tools mainly to make drones. The forum is used to sharing the OSH projects, learn about Arduino, 3D printing, Raspberry, RC, and anything that can be made.
The cost containment and rapid development possibie through cooperation, hardware sharing and co-creativity go to benefit the drone models. Escuadron SpainLabs members have so far developed 4 designs – each with a foldable and a fixed version – and built two of them. They use the SLxxx numeration to define each new design and Santos estimates that community members have built as many as 60 units so far.
“The most important peculiarity that we strive for is to enable people, especially newbies, to fly with a low cost prototype, which means under $120 for all parts;” says Santos. “This is very important, because many parts can break in the very first flights but can be easily and cheaply replaced – and even modified – by sharing the original model files.”
“The community members who own 3D printers can make the parts for those who don’t and just want to focus on drone assembly and flight,” says Santos. This enables the SpainLabs “troops” to be self sufficient and not rely on expensive external suppliers of parts: a winning strategy in any aerial battle.
