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I want to build a drone that can carry around 7lbs. Is it possible to make a drone that can carry that much weight using electric motors without it being over /$500?

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  • $\begingroup$ How can I know "Moderately Expensive" ? give certain limits $\endgroup$
    – Fennekin
    May 27, 2016 at 9:42
  • $\begingroup$ What is "ridiculously expensive" to you? Would you pay \$1k for such a drone? \$10k? \$100k? With regard to the second question, how much experience do you have designing drones? $\endgroup$
    – Dave Tweed
    May 27, 2016 at 11:25
  • $\begingroup$ "moderately expensive" is too vague. Is it under $10000? or $1000? $10000000? $\endgroup$
    – DLS3141
    May 27, 2016 at 12:57
  • $\begingroup$ @DLS3141: Note that you need to put a backslash in front of a dollar sign (\$) if you want to avoid invoking MathJax. $\endgroup$
    – Dave Tweed
    May 28, 2016 at 20:48
  • $\begingroup$ Is my question alright then or do I need to delete it? $\endgroup$
    – Chris Manning
    May 29, 2016 at 2:47

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Yes it is.

You wanna carry roughly 3.5 kg. Let's make the drone with payload 10kg heavy. For a quad rotor, with TWR of 2, I can get the 4 motors for 1200\$ (public price from T-motor U8 Pro), I don't know the price of the propellers, let's say 400\$. The whole makes 1kg. Adding 3 kg for the frame (I roughly scale down from a 25kg drone) and 2500\$ (here, I have no idea how much it would cost), we've got 2.5kg for Lithium Cells, it's roughly a 10Ah 12S battery, for 500\$. We may add 200\$ for electronics and sensors (and roughly no weight).

You've got your drone for less than 5000\$, flying 20 minutes. It excludes the cost of the time you'll spend in development, and also the cost of the prototypes you'll need to correct the approximations I made, unless you accept performances far from this first approximation.

If you plan to design your own propeller, you'll probably need 100000$ for CFD tools, prototypes, and measurement tools. If you want a cheap prototype, use off-the-shelf components. If you plan to build thousands of drones, then the prices above are irrelevant, and you should consider some serious R&D.

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