Crococopter

By uldis on Aug 05, 2018

90  7,461  17

Behold the mighty Crococopter!

Disclaimer: this is by no means something to seriously consider building. It's just a little tongue-in-cheek side project made while being grounded.
TL;DR: Yes, it's real and it actually flies. Here's a few videos: start with the shoe doing some LOS flips and rolls and the shoe being flown in FPV. Due to popular demand, here's the shoe kicking a beach ball (LOS and FPV combined).

So we start off by finding an old, dirty and ugly, but still perfectly usable Crocs knock-off shoe. Strip a grounded LDARC/KingKong 200GT off all its electronics and use those to ultimately make the shoe do flips and flops. As the shoe comes with very convenient openings, we only need to use some zip ties and double-sided sticky tape to attach things to it, without compromising the canopy in any permanent way. It's still going back to do its original job after a replacement frame for the 200GT arrives.

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This is a 5 inch build, so for arms we use two 31cm long and about 2.5cm wide plywood strips to clear the canopy. Electronics sit on a cardboard slate, which is super lightweight and provides excellent vibration dampening. The most tedious part of the build is perhaps resoldering all the motor wires because of the extra arm length. Again, thanks to a decent amount of random openings in the canopy, one can go wild with picking where to route the motor wires through. Make sure to add some colorful heatshrink over solder joints to make it even uglier.

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The motors (also salvaged from the 200GT) need to go down on arms, so we drill 3 holes - there are two 12mm apart for the screws, and a larger one inbetween them where the motor shaft with c-ring goes. While the bigger hole really only needs to go a couple mm deep, I still drilled it all the way through for better cooling. Not that it's necessary, but I figured the build needed something that says "cool", so there's that.

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With all that empty space inside and out of the canopy, you have full artistic freedom on where to mount your FPV camera and receiver. I just stuck them on top of the whole thing, but later moved the receiver inside of the canopy to better protect the antennas. It's not like rubber causes any significant reception issues anyway, so I think I'll get away with that.

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An important note about battery placement. Initially I planned to put it inside canopy at the heel, but that resulted in a serious backwards drift upon first takeoff. Resorted to double-locking tape and mounting the battery on the bottom of the frame to achieve a perfect CG.

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Photos

Discussion

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chinmarifpv   Sep 15, 2022  
1

the crock with rgb led's would be crazy

folgoris   May 07, 2022  

Is there a video showing a test of this build?

Povilas   Dec 03, 2020  

What is total weight? I also want to build this drone. What do you thing about my choice of parts?: 1806 2300kv motors, 4x 10A esc, iflight f4 controller, Matek FCHUB-6S PDB and 3s 850mah battery (or 4s 1500mah is beter?)

FrankyFPV   Oct 17, 2020  

"the most aerodinamic and durable frame ever"

hillslide   Aug 24, 2020  

You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

PixelFpv   Apr 06, 2020  

That is actually awesome and kind of very hilarious 😁

volitant   Aug 05, 2018  
7

that probably has the best soft mounting ever

uldis   Aug 05, 2018 
3

Oh yes, it's soft-mounted-everything, including the arms :D
Seriously though, it flew way better than anticipated as seen in the FPV video linked at the start. No apparent jello or any other issues.

freerider101   Feb 01, 2019 

Well, you can't get any more soft-mounting than that. :)

Thomaat   Nov 14, 2018  

I NEED flight footage of this man!!

Jamesmac   Aug 16, 2018  
1

Awesome!!

thumbtwiddler   Aug 08, 2018  
2

this is cursed

le_vinsky   Aug 06, 2018  
7

Looks like it has a lot of kick.

6amFPV   Aug 05, 2018  
1

Now that's awsome 😂

uldis   Aug 05, 2018 

Thanks, happy to have made you smile :)

Burning North   Aug 05, 2018  
1

You are a monster and my hat is off to you. <3

uldis   Aug 05, 2018 
1

Thanks mate! Hope you had a good laugh :)

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