Developing a smartphone mount for a drone
A brief story of what we went through designing, prototyping and testing a smartphone attachment for a drone
Drone technology is being developed exponentially, which is allowing the average Jo to own a drone. This means there is a growing need/want to develop consumer products in the industry. In 2015 we were hired to explore a drone mount that allowed the operator to attach their smartphone to a bracket of sorts on the drone and use the high quality camera from the smart phone to film. The final prototype was designed to hold most smart phones except the really large (phablits) at that time. This was a short, sweet and efficient project. We handed over a working prototype after a few months having gone through three initial prototypes and exploring a few different designs in sketch.
The recipe here was straight forward and driven by very particular constraints
Design a device that aids a smartphone to be mounted to a DJI Phantom
- The smartphone should have the ability to tilt up and down.
- The smartphone to be attached quickly, easily and requiring no tools
- Smartphone to be sturdy and secure once mounted (obviously we don’t want our expensive phones falling out mid flight).
- Design to be lightweight and robust.
- Design to be easy to manufacture if we had to scale to mass production
- We also need to be aware about using a low volume production in the early stages of the project.
After deciding on the above constraints, we indulged in some research which entailed analyzing and measuring a DJI Phantom, finding our maximum and minimum smartphone sizes, research into the field and what other products are available and a bit of back and fourth between the client who was an expert in the drone field from New York.
Once we had our research setup, we ran through some quick initial sketches which always circled back to the research and client until we had a design with a direction ready to refine.
We had great fun coming up with ideas to mount the phone to the drone. In the beginning of any project, we normally head wide with ideas, trying to understand as many solutions we can use to solve the problem. This is a no judgement phase, as ideas can evolve and trigger different thoughts from someone else in the team very often leading to innovative solutions.
As much as we like to spend time in the clouds thinking of different ideas. Reality is real, and we had a budget and timeline to stick to. We had to start refining our concepts and getting to the prototyping phase to test.
Prototyping was a vital part as it required us to test the fitment of a range of smartphones into the design. When using external factors and especially something like a drone mount in which the smartphone needs to stay incredibly secure. Fitment and testing was incredibly vital. Our first, very rough prototype you can see in green, was printed using our in-house FDM printer. It was pretty rough, but it showed great results in terms of fitting onto a few types of phones and proved our basic concept well.
Learning from the negative features and refining the positive feedback. We ended up making a few iterations in the green mamba design, mainly tweaking some of the dimensions and shapes of the hands that secured the phone.
We decided on using an anodized aluminum sheet-metal design for the base of the unit for a few main reasons (everything in the render that is black, is aluminium):
- The design had to be as lightweight as possible
- We needed a low volume, cost-effective option in-case we ran a production run of around less than 200 units
- The design needed strength and rigidity
3D Printing the hands (orange parts in the render) in Nylon was the most cost effective way we could achieve the results we needed. The design of the hands was developed with injection moulding in mind but for this prototype we used SLS technology. The main reasons for SLS 3D printing were:
- These parts needed to be as accurate as possible, with a close to final part as possible surface finish. This method of printing can produce close to 0.05 mm accurate tolerance with a reasonable surface finish.
- The parts performed a mechanical function. They snapped onto the aluminium base and flexed to accommodate a range of phone thicknesses.
We moved forward and on to a proof of concept prototype which would be printed in a white Nylon and white anodized aluminum for the base.
This was one of my first projects when I started Design Make Connect, it was a project with not much budget for development, but sometimes that‘s okay, it was a fun project to be involved in. The goals and constraints from the client going into the project were met at the end with our prototype, which we shipped to the client. The product performed all the necessary tasks he wanted to test with this concept. As far as we know, they did not take the concept further for reasons we don’t know. Sometimes it’s just like that. There’s still so much room for development in this product, and who knows, maybe even some market potential!
Taking an idea to market is hard work and designing the product/prototype is sometimes only the beginning. Most of the time, it will take more time and money than you think and can be very intimidating. The way this project ran, was quite an efficient balance of money verse end results (prototype). At the end of the day it would have been the clients job to test the design fully, generate feedback, look at branding, market potential, costings, roll out etc. As much as we love developing products and the business surrounding them, if the budget only allows us to develop the prototype, we can’t do everything else as well. Obviously we will always consult on as much as we can, giving the client a better understanding of what’s involved when taking a product to market.
If you enjoyed the read, please give a few claps, if you’d like to ask a question leave a comment, and if you’re looking to develop a product visit our site to find out more! www.designmakeconnect.com
Thanks for reading!
Cheers, Dylan
