Turner Jennings

Objective and outcomes

The objective of this design was to create a waterproof enclosure to house the telemetry, power distribution, and flight controller for a quadcopter drone. This design was part of my undergraduate capstone, where we collaborated with the Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics to create a drone capable of delivering bioacoustics monitoring sensors into the Amazon Rainforest for the XPRIZE Rainforest Competition.

This project highlights my ability to incorporate electro-mechanical components and iterate on existing designs.

Original configuration with two boxes

Design Process

Due to the humid and rainy environment of the Amazon, all non-motor electronics needed to be enclosed in waterproof boxes. Previous iterations of the UAV design had split the flight computer and telemetry into one enclosure and power distribution into another. This design created a larger number of ingress points into each box, and complicated maintenance procedures. A single enclosure which allowed easy access and replacement of all electronics was needed to reduce system downtime while on site in the rainforest.

Preparation of the drone for test flight, the electronics enclosure can be seen on top of the frame

Key features

• A single electronics enclosure was designed with a tiered management system with kept the antennae far from interfering electronics and allowed for easy maintenance access to all layers.
• The one-box design reduced the number of wire ingresses by half. The remaining ingresses were served by waterproof grommets.
• The updated design allowed all of the electronics to be removed and laid out outside of the box for maintenance, then packed up again for flight.
• The one-box design eliminated the need to remove the structural top plate of the drone body to service the failure-prone motor controllers, significantly reducing maintenance time