Dropping Eggs from Drones for Fun and Science - The Claw Egg Drop Mechanism

I was invited by a local school to participate in their Egg-Drop science event and this is one of the results. The reason they invited me was because they wanted to do something different this year. Instead of dropping boxes to protect contained eggs they wanted to drop eggs from a drone or multirotor and try to catch and protect the eggs.

The first iteration of the concept was this claw-type mechanism to drop one egg at a time. I modified the snap mounting from http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:745817 (Thank you glenchung!) to hold a servo. Assembly requires a miniservo and a bit of solid core wire or we hot glued part of a zip tie to the servo arm.

I had planed to use http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:28566 to create a custom servo arm but moved to a more complicated Rotary Egg Dropper instead. Check it out here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:859220/

More information at Instructables.com (http://www.instructables.com/id/Dropping-eggs-from-drones-for-fun-and-science/)

Instructions

I printed in PLA with two perimeters, two bottom layers, two top layers, no support and 15% infill. The result needed some filing in order to fit the servo and to snap to the Iris+ arm. I never ended up screwing the servo in place because it was a snug enough without help.

The picture of the clip mounted to the Iris is of our "practice egg". Don't use i-hooks on real eggs and don't test fit with real eggs either. For the event I used a couple inches of electrical tape to make a loop on top of the eggs for the claw to grip.

Category: R/C Vehicles