Someone just sent me a message regarding a 3D printed UAV design I did a few years ago, it turns out a US Marines corporal took the design, called it his own and won a Marines design challenge with it. :mad: U.S. Marine develops low-cost 3D-printed UAS
The hell he modeled after the “Wasp” (whatever that is), he took my whole design and simply swapped the motor from being on the tail to the nose of the drone.
The gall of it!
I designed the UAV over three years ago, I uploaded the files for 3D printing to a popular 3D printing file sharing website under a Creative Commons license, it’s non-commercial and any use requires attribution, obviously he got the files there.
It’s not just the design at issue, for instance I developed a novel technique for printing wings using FFM 3D printing technology that prints the wing panels and internal structure in a single, continuous extrusion, making them lighter, stronger and faster to print than normal techniques.
I wasn’t just aiming to make a cool looking plane, I spent months exploring the best methods to use 3D printing for drone manufacturing and modularity concepts.
Possible I suppose, but if you look carefully at the published pictures and Ale’s design on Thingverse, there are a number of details that are perfectly copied. Those details are much finer and more damning than both designs having straight 3-section wings, a boxy fuselage, and a V tail.
The most obviously copied details, from my ~5 minutes of looking, are things like the way the forward fuselage and cockpit pieces join together, and the way the aft fuselage section is screwed (?) to the center section. Keep looking, and you can see that every piece is practically identical.
It’s identical in every detail except that he mounted the motor on the nose by omitting the nose cone and bolting it directly to the front bulkhead, the redesign being comprised of drilling four holes there. The other difference is that he appears to have glued a camera pod on the bottom. :smack:
Both changes do nothing but screw up the design, I placed the motor on the rear so that a camera could be mounted on the nose with an undisturbed field of view (not to mention that a belly mounted camera on a plane with no landing gear is a recipe for broken cameras), also mounting the motor on the rear minimizes RF interference that could affect the R/C, GPS and video downlink signals.
I find it amusing that the IG site has a list of questions at the bottom that are all links to the answer to that question except for “Is your complaint classified?” which looks like it has a link but doesn’t actually.
Oh I believe, you, I was just reflexively qualifying all my statements. Plus, I didn’t want to give too much weight to my five-minute, pre-coffee examination of a half megapixel jpg.