INV-X1 "Alatus"

Overview

I'm still working on adding an overview and more information about this project, so here's an AI overview for now. Enjoy lol. Alatus is a custom fixed-wing UAV I'm designing and building from scratch — not from a kit. The goal was to go through the full process myself: sizing the aircraft, modeling every structural component, 3D printing the airframe, and building a custom avionics system to fly it.

Aerodynamic Design

Before touching CAD, I worked through the aerodynamics by hand — applying fluid mechanics principles to size the wing and estimate performance. This gave me the numbers I needed (wing area, aspect ratio, expected lift) before committing to a structure.

Structural Design

The wing ribs and fuselage were modeled in SolidWorks using surface modeling techniques. I paid close attention to geometry, weight distribution, center-of-gravity placement, and how heat from onboard electronics would need to be managed — all while keeping every part realistically manufacturable on an FDM printer.

Fabrication

Every structural part is 3D printed with FDM, using heat-set inserts and mechanical fasteners at the joints so the airframe can be assembled, disassembled, and repaired rather than glued together permanently — durability and maintainability were a big part of the design brief for myself.

Avionics & Software

The avionics system is being built around an ATmega328P microcontroller, an MPU-6050 IMU for orientation sensing, and an nRF24L01 transceiver for wireless telemetry. Within the next week I will be working on writing the embedded code that reads the IMU, stabilizes the aircraft in flight, and streams telemetry back to the ground.

Status

Currently in progress the airframe is built (tail is being printed), and I'm working through the avionics and flight stabilization software next. More updates (and hopefully flight footage) to come.