Nightwing is an FPV drone that can be 3D printed on an FDM printer. I designed this drone frame with FPV (first-person-view) racing and freestyle recreational flying in mind. This frame design consists of 5 main parts: the bottom plate, the arms, the middle-plate, the camera mount and the top plate that stack over each other. The motor-to-motor arm distance is about 220 mm and the frame can house a 5" propeller blade. The configuration I used for the frame is a squashed 'X', hence the props would be in view for certain camera angles. The arms are about 7 mm thick. For the material I used PLA Pro, however there is still a bit of flex in the arms and printing in Nylon or carbon fiber doped polymers would be better. All the frame parts were secured using M3 hardware.

I designed the middle plate with mounting holes that are 30.5 mm apart for a full-sized flight controller. I used the iFlight Succex-E F7 flight controller stack (w/45A ESCs). The mounting holes for the motors are 16 mm apart and support most brushless DC motors on the market. I previously used the Xing 2207 2450 KV motors which I later upgraded to 2604 1650 KV for better performance and efficiency. The camera mount can house any micro FPV camera. I used the Runcam Phoenix II analog camera for my build. I also designed 2 camera mounts (longer and shorter) since I did not have enough room initially to fit my flight controller stack along with the video transmitter. To transmit the analog video, I used the Succex-Force VTX (25 - 600mW). For controlling the drone, I used an FrSky R-XSR receiver (2.4Ghz) that connected to my radio transmitter. The battery is strapped on to the top-plate. The flight controller and the motors can support 14 V to 22 V, hence I used a 4S LiPo battery for my build.