After my first custom quad wich took a lot of rough landings and finally crashed from about 40 meters due to disconnected battery Ive kinda overbuild this one.
Arms are 15x15x1mm aluminium profiles, centerplates are 2mm laser cut aluminium. Im using 3S batteries (5000 or 2200 mAh), ESCs are 18A Turnigy Plush and motors 900kV Turnigy from HK, driving APC SF10x4.7. M2M is 40cm (so i dont have to make extensions for ESC-motor wires. it weights about 900g with the smaller battery, flight time is about 12min (or 20min with the larger battery).
Electronics (APM, IMU, Xbee, GPS, MAG and receiver are mounted with doublesided tape, plastic L profiles inside an CD spindle. ESCs and homemade power distribution (wil post another blog about it) are under the spindle.
Top cover removed: the props are from the first quad and while i was learning to fly they took a lot of beating.
Inside (detail). All wires are glued to the connectors. The thing in the middle (with red heatshrink) connects all esc wires and leaves power from only one ESC for APM (with possibility to drive other electronics from other ESCs). This wa i dont need to cut 3 ESC power wires. Its made from stacking .1in headers with two 90deg rotated layers of the black plastic parts wich hold the pins.
LED lights inside arms
Side view. There are two power connectors. This quad is really small, its possible to transport it inside a notebook cardboard box with TX, charger, batteries and some spare parts.
Bottom view: centerplates, ESCs, power connectors on both sides and "landing gear" made of 6cm plastic standoffs. My GOPRO fits nicely between front arms (and under the spindle) pointing about 45deg down.
This quad flies nice in windless conditions and some tweaks in default PIDS, I hope to tweak it a bit to better fly in windy conditions. In my next frame "revision" im planning to use 10x10x1mm arms and Mikrokopter centerplates to save about 100g on weight (more than 10%).
