Snapchat Pixy Drone Blade Guard Replacement Part

Simple replacement part for the blade guards on the Snapchat Pixy drone.

Printing Suggestions

My tests and final prints were done with a stock Prusa MINI+ in Prusament PETG with the stock 0.4mm nozzle. Better results came from lowering max speed and accelleration although the quality improvements weren't massive. In the end some post-processing was definitely required to clean up the “pegs” on the ends of the arms, which were a bit globby since they're such small vertical protusions.

The best results in my testing used the following settings:

• PrusaSlicer Preset: 0.10mm DETAIL
• Speed Changes:
  • Speed for print moves
    • Perimeters: 20mm/s
    • Small perimeters: 15mm/s
    • External perimeters: 20mm/s
    • Infill: 20mm/s
    • Solid infill: 20mm/s
    • Top solid infill: 20mm/s
    • Support material: 20mm/s
    • Gap fill: 20mm/s
  • Speed for non-print moves
    • Travel: 100mm/s
  • Modifiers
    • First layer speed: 15mm/s
  • Acceleration Control
    • Perimeters: 400mm/s
    • Infill: 400mm/s
    • Bridge: 400mm/s
    • First layer: 400mm/s
    • Default: 400mm/s
• Filament Settings
  • Max volumetric speed: 3mm/s

Background Information

Although Snapchat basically killed off the Pixy drone product after only a three months or so, some of us actually bought one and find it kinda fun use. As of October 4th 2022 they're still “supporting” users of the Pixy, which is nice.

In late September I broke one of the blade guards while traveling with the drone, so I emailed their support team. After some back and forth the only suggestion they had for fixing the blade guard involved having me ship the drone to them for warranty replacement (!), which seemed a bit extreme for a small plastic part. They don't offer replacement part purchases at all.

So instead of dealing with shipping the little guy off and haggling with their support team I decided to bust out the calipers and spend an hour or so in Fusion 360 modeling up a replacement. I wasn't sure whether a printed replacement would have the same mass/rigidity as the original molded (likely ABS?) part but, in the end, the replacement part performed perfectly!

Hopefully having this part model readily available will help other folks in the same situation. These little drones are pretty fun to use and I'm really sad that they were built to be such disposable objects. So here's one way to keep these lil' guys working, hopefully for many years to come. 

Also, I'm working on a proper printable hard-top case for the Pixy to make it easier to travel with. If I had just spent some time cooking that up before traveling with the drone its possible that I wouldn't have needed to deal with replacing the blade guard in the first place. :)

Edit: Drone case is done! Check it out: Snapchat Pixy Travel Case

Oh, and if you're curious about what's inside one of these Pixy drones, check out the teardown photos I posted on Flickr the other day:

 https://flickr.com/photos/560/albums/72177720302606149