Teardown a 3D printed Drone Claw

Info

This claw is used for drone, to pickup items or drop items. I used for pickup “crashed” small size other drones.

This is a chinese made drone claw, so far I have not found the claw 3d printed parts on any 3d printing collection website yet. The claw part also looks good.

However, the electronic part is not good enough, there are three small pieces of PCB inside of the cabin, and a lot of wires, I broken one black wire of the motor while I put all stuff back into the cabin. There are much more things can be improved for electronic parts. At least it is working.

Malfunction part: when the claw is in fully “close” status, the motor fail to run to “open” status, the motor probably does not have start-up capacitor, I will need to rotate the motor to “help” it to start.

Teardown

Remove the screws of the side claw parts.

The underneath and close loop of the bottom part

Open the cabin, the first look of the inside, the tape warpped part is a DCDC regulator, nothing interesting to say.

The main controller part PCB, we can see it includes motor control, RF signal and probably a MCU controller, because there is a crystal around.

Output are motors IN+ IN- and RF signal IN+ IN- (?)

The top PCB is a TP4056 battery charge board.

The rest in the cabin is a very small dc motor, which probably not strong enough.

The motor come out with a shaft coupler part, and connect to a long M3 screw, to drive finally the claw