It's now been five months of development, seven prototype revisions, 10 prototypes in all, and at long last, the Badger is ready for prime time! Pre-order is up now!
Here's the Promo video made with 2nd prototype, a new Promo will be shot with the production frame, as soon as the weather cooperates, lol.
The Honey Badger is a lasercut Delrin quad designed as a FPV "fighter jet" quad. The idea for this quad was to have a small, lightweight, "bash 'em up" quad that you could use to refine your flying skills without risking a $200 to $400 Gopro. Sure, I love filming great videos with the Gopro, but it would never of happened if I didn't have a little quad like this to refine my skills... flying around buildings, trees, into tight spaces or small openings... practicing flips, rolls, and other aerobatic craziness. I also like using this to test out new antennas and push my range. Instead of risking $1000 worth of aircraft, I have maybe $300 worth of gear on this quad.
Why Delrin? Because its very durable! I've crashed my prototypes over and over and they just keep going! On the 2nd prototype I did have an arm plate break. While one arm plate broke, the other flexed like gumby, then straightened back out. I've gotten to the point where if I'm in a hurry I don't even bother with a soft landing, I just come in and bash it into the ground. Honey badger don't care! The trick is to keep the mass low... if the aircraft is lightweight then there's less inertia to cause carnage in a crash. A quad designed to carry a gopro will need to account for the 3.7 ounces (with LayerLens) which means more powerful motors which will need a bigger heavier battery and a heavier frame... at that point you've got 3 to 4 pounds and crashes WILL cause carnage. Remove the gopro from the equation and you only have 2 to 3 ounces worth of fpv gear (camera, vtx, voltage osd) and you end up with a lightweight fighter jet that will have a better chance at surviving crashes.
The arms tab into the hub plates so tightly that you can hold up the frame by a single hub plate and the arms won't fall off. Also, one of my beta testers managed to get several flights out of his WITHOUT any screws in the hub plates, lol. He said that when it came apart it just tumbled down, nothing was broken and he had it back in the air (WITH screws) about 20 minutes later!
Other innovations include the vibration isolated fpv camera mount. By keeping the vibes out your CCD or CMOS camera sensor will also maintain a sharper focus, its also designed to keep vibrations out of your Video Transmitter which extends the life of the vTx and can prevent video interference issues due to vibration affecting the RF circuitry. The camera by itself isn't heavy enough, doesn't have enough mass to make the system work, so the mass of your vTx is added, which includes the weight of your antenna, plus a simple voltage OSD or TBS Core adds a bit more mass to it. In my experience, you need almost 3 ounces of weight on the mount to really get the most out of it, but if you intend to use a lightweight mini camera, and lightweight vtx, you may just want to skip the upper plate and Isolators, and simply hard mount everything.
Pricing as follows...
Complete Kit - $120
- Quad frame (4 arms)
- 2 extra arm plates and the standoffs screws to complete it (one whole arm)
- Standoffs
- 4-40 frame screws
- 5 rubber "landing gear" (one spare)
- Bamboo vibration isolation FPV mount
- L Allen wrench for frame screws
- 20 x M3 motor screws, button head black oxide
Replacement Parts
- Arm plates $6 per plate ($12 for an arm)
- Hub plates $15 each (upper or lower, same price - $30 for a set)
- Bamboo Camera Mount $15
Shipping
- Inside of the United States I know I can do USPS Priority with tracking for $7. As for getting it quicker, via UPS or Fedex or shipping International... I won't know until I try, so please work with me until I get a firm grasp of how expensive shipping is. So far I've been shipping in boxes, but considering that the kit is mostly flat pieces I think it could all go into a padded envelope just fine, and probably be a lot cheaper to ship.
How to buy? Head over to fpvmonkey.com or just click this http://www.fpvmonkey.com/the-honey-badger-quad-frame-kit/
Here's a link to the Development thread over at Fpvlab...
Thanks for your interest!
~Flying Monkey
Comments
Will be starting my build in a couple of weeks and plan to carry an APM2.5 and will also try a KK2. Will post here the results. Thanks Peter!
:) wow, stayed in the air.. nice... your blades must have been spinning a lot faster than mine. yeah the latest pictures (assuming the pics are latest) look great.
I keep making my quads too nice to practice my flying skills.. so I finally just broke down and got a F450 frame and some spare arms and cheap motors... hopefully I can resist the urge to make it nice too.
@ Mark
You are correct, the antenna was WAY too close to the prop in that video, in fact I did have an incident with the prop chewing up the coax, but video was never lost and I landed safely (heard a weed wacker though, lol). But keep in mind, that was the 2nd prototype...
If you look at the pictures you can see I learned from that incident... the vtx is now mounted to a piece of bamboo longitudinally, the antenna is now further back on the hub and dead center left/right.
As I watch the video I keep thinking about the video transmitter antenna.. my worse crash I had ever had was when my antenna flexed enough to make contact with the prop, which then ripped the transmitter completely off the my quad where I never found it again, and caused the quad to fall out of the sky like a rock, breaking two arms completely off and damaging one of the motors and breaking three props.
The antenna in your (above) pictures looks safe, but the way it is mounted in the video looks really close to the prop and the antenna wire looks like it could easily flex enough to make contact.
As with Derrick I was one of the first Batch of Beta testers.........I am a compleat noob to the quad world but Flying Monkey got me up and running. His notion was that if I could do it anyone could get this quad going. For my first quad I found it almost fool proof to put together. If he hadnt of packaged it so well, all I would have had to do was give the box a good shake and all the parts would have fell together I think. The thing goes together like a cross between Legos and an old Erector set. The Delrin parts ''snap'' together and are held together with screws. In fact on his FPVLAB.com therad there is a great account of one of the other beta testers, in his haste to get his Badger in the air, compleatly forgot to put ALL of the bottom plate screws in which hold all the arms in. He was able to fly several circuts during the maiden. It wasnt until he got more agressive with the manuvers did the poor Badger ''fold'' up like a weighted tissue, held together only by ESC wires. It wasnt until he retrieved it did he realize his mistake and carried it back to the car laughing. There was no damage to his Badger and after he installed the screws he was flying again.
There are about 14 different Delrin parts that need to be snaped and bolted together to make this a complete flying rig.....but.....of thoes 14 parts only three components are made......4 arms......the body and 4 motor mount plates. This means that several parts are the same and interchangeable. All the arm plates are the same.....all the motor plates are the same and while he does have specefic top and bottom body plates even thoes could be interchangable........makes for a simple build.......literaly 15 minutes with an alan wrench and some locktite.
While I am a noob with the quads I do have a good amount of experience with R/C hellies back in the 90's. This quad was easy for me to take out and fly in the driveway for the maiden hover. In no time I had my FPV gear on it and was tearing around the neighborhood duck pond.
Fun simple lil quad........I highly recomend it!!!
@ Wayne, I'll send ya a PM :)
@ MJ, Yeah I got pretty creative with the camera booms, a lot of trail and error, crashes, lol. The one where you can see the entire quad... put the gopro 14 inches behind the CG, so the boom extends out past the nose so that a 2200mah 3s can be put in front of the fpv cam, obscured my view a bit, lol. And the CG was still off by several inches... didn't fly too well if I pushed it hard, but if I kept it smooth and stable it didn't give a shit :)
The viewpoint that is up front looking backwards, seeing the fpv cam... that was especially hard as I had to pilot with a 3/4" boom in front of the fpv cam, but the gopro was high enough to be out of the way.
For the next video I have more adventurous camera angles planned, whether they work or fail I don't know... but in my opinion you have to be willing to fail in order to succeed :)
Presumed you had seen it too FM - it of one of those that went kinda viral. They are remarkable critters.
So I'm now standing by now for your next FPV vid flying the Honey Badger in a snake pit (not that I wish ill will on these remarkable critters too!.)
Hey your GoPro photography needs comment too. Gave a great perspective on the machine doing the business. Hope the frame sells well for you.
MJ
@ MJ, ha! Was wondering how long it'd take before someone posted that video!
@Michael, It's not my lasercutter, I'm paying for a shop to cut them, for now ;) And it's Delrin and Bamboo
@Wayne, I'm surprised you didn't see this over at Fpvlab first! The thread over there is already up to 1550 posts!! Sad you won't make it to pdxdrones :( But yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing your TechPod in person and showing you the Badger in person :D
Nice quad. Would like to get one myself after things calm down for me. Send me a pm when you can. I won't be able to make it to pdxdrones meetup like i said. Turns out that is the day the TPs show up:(
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