I have done this power layout to ensure power failsafe if something goes wrong.

Someone sent me the link of this of the APM rebranding.

ArduFlyer

I have found this link about some paranoid anti drone person.

I am not sure if it was shown here but they stole footage of from black sheeps videos.

Hello,

A colleague of mine asked me to build a quad copter for him for where he can do photography with his GoPro, so I drew up some prices and with the 3DR quad frame and a GoPro Gimbal it was over $300 excluding motors and esc's so I went on ebay and found the frame above (Quad Frame on Ebay).

First I was concerned about those fiber glass motor mounts so I ordered replacement parts from small cnc parts to replace these motor mounts (Small Parts CNC on Ebay)

I had to drill one hole per arm to fit these but once these were on it was very firm no vibrations was going to get the better of these arms. I baught the 850kv motors and the 20amp esc from 3DR and those extended wires worked very well and neat going thru the quad arms.

I also baught the 3DR PDB and to my surpise it is quite a snug fit between the two main plates (one has to drill new holes to mount it though)

There is only two bad things from this frame

  1. No parts available

  2. Between the legs, battery mount and gimbal there is no neat way with the 3DR sonar mount to mount the sonar.

What nice is about the gimbal is that there are 3 servos 1 big one and 2 small once and on of the small ones is mounted in such a way that it can push the camera button, its got a nice arm and everything for this.

But I must warn you this is a bit of a lego/puzzel to build this quad you have to think a bit.

I then loaded the standard 3DR parmas for a base to start tuning the PID's (3DR Quad Parms) an to my surprise this quad ended up more stable than my own 3DR quad frame without any PID tuning, see video below.

Hope this was helpfull in selecting a cheap frame

I would like to find out more about this project.

I have the TH 9X channel transmitter, and the biggest problem I have with this remote is the most accurate way to change flight modes is by flicking one switch so whenever I want to change a flight mode I have to change flight mode 6 because flight mode 1 is always stabilize and simple mode, now this gets a bit irritating so one day someone posted a blog here of a potentiometer with 6 clicks and some variable resistors to each click on the potentiometer so you can define the PWM. I bought this for about $15 here and it was at my door in about 4 days, it was crazy. I bought the unsoldered version so I had to do some fine soldering.

Now the variable resistors has 3 legs (+) (Feedback) (-) it does not matter which way is the plus and minus. I took an old parallel cable from an old hard drive mounting and cut 6 strips from it about 10cm long and cleaned the plastic from it and soldered the two most outer wires from the bunch to the (+) and (-) and then Is soldered to all of the pins a piece of wire.

Once all that was done, I soldered the 4 inner wires to a number on the potentiometer, and the previous potentiometers brown wire where it said brown and the black to the black and red to the red. I then soldered the 2 most outer wires to the black and the red.

I then broke of the previous potentiometers plastic housing and drilled a bigger hole in the cover so that the new potentiometer can fit. Please note the extra smaller hole on the left hand side of the big one that I made, it is so that the new potentiometer fits snug into the hole.

I then fitted the nozzle thru the whole tightened it with a nut on the outside.

I then found a nice place to hot glue the variable resistors to the back of the cover so it is easy to come by with a screw driver because you have to adjust the variable resistors so that the signal is set to the correct PWM for the specific flight mode.

And then I started tuning the inner flight modes because the most outer two knob settings is always flight mode 1 and six and knob area 4 is also always flight mode 1. First set your aux-ch option to the following. Please note channel 5 is set to Pit trim.

I opened flight planner and started turning the variable resistors on each unit until the green on the dropdowns showed on the correct place.

An now I have 5 accurate flight modes to choose from without any hassle.

Hope it was help full and happy flying.

Hey all I got my 3DR package today, it was like opening a present in christmas

APM2

3DR Quad Frame Kit with motors and ESC's

MinimOSD

CCD Camera

3DR 900mhz radio

LV-EZ0 Sonar and mount

2 hoodies (It is winter here in South Africa so it is NICE)

I waited 6 weeks before it was at my door but it is all worth it, thank you 3DR.