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Studio-edited overhead photograph of the manufactured white drone frame and smart battery cover on a navy backdrop.

Drone Frame & Smart Battery

A quadcopter frame for aerial photography and the quick-swap smart battery that clips into it, designed for JapanDrones’ line-up of additively manufactured drones.

Project stage
Manufactured parts
Work type
Client project
Client
JapanDrones

The frame

  • Render of the frame body with its four arms.
  • Render of the frame’s main body shell.
  • The printed frame with a camera gimbal fitted, opened up to show the wiring.

The frame was designed around a compact arrangement of components, with an organic outer shape and room for the camera and battery. We worked on the structure and assembly rather than claiming a measured flight-performance improvement.

Snap-fit connectors replace brass inserts, so the parts plug together, and the frame takes the smart battery with a quick-attach mechanism.

Smart battery

  • Render of the smart battery enclosure: a tall housing with a pink top cover and a contact strip on its side.
  • Top view of the battery enclosure, open to show its inner tray.

A LiPo battery enclosure in two pieces, so batteries swap quickly. A push button and light guides are built into the top cover.

Because the drones are additively manufactured, we iterated the tolerances against real prints.

Our role and delivery

Our contribution was the drone frame and quick-swap battery enclosure, including snap-fits, board and battery space, and tolerances refined against printed parts. The finished frame and printed assemblies are shown above; this case study does not claim an independently verified flight-performance result.

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