Here's my quad copter flying with my 1.7 kg 3/4" plywood bench testing jig designed to prevent it from flying.

I was in the backyard yesterday testing my failsafe settings and decided to give it some throttle, much to my surprise it actually lifted off.  I'll have to try lifting something in the near future... and I'll have to clamp the test jig down from now on.

(Yes, I am concerned about prop safety and the motors are not powered up most of the time.  The test jig is for those rainy days when I want to power up the ESCs and not launch into the rafters).

Hello everyone, this is my 2nd quad.  I decided to go heavy duty for aerial photography and FPV in the future, starting out lighter weight with a goPro HD for now.

Hardware:

• Rusty's BQ frame.  Extremely sturdy frame.
• I added the CM-1 landing gear and floating camera mount.  I had Trex 450 skids laying around, but i need something bigger.
• Arms are 1/2 square alu tubing from metalsdepot.com
• AVroto 2814 short shaft from montorc.com.
• APC 11*4.7 props
• Turnigy 30a Plush ESCs
• Custom power distribution harness
• Turnigy LED strips, white for front, red/green for rear.  Currently controlled with the JST plug you see hanging off the starboard side in the bottom picture.
• APM 2560 / IMU-Oilpan Rev H, mediatek GPS, magnetometer
• Weight is 1.8 kg without batts (counting the goPro) and flying weight is about 2.3 kg with the 4s4000.

In order to reduce vibration I mounted half-round balsa strips under the prop wash area on top of the arms, attached the LED strips, then covered the entire arm length with 1.1/2 inch clear heat shrink tubing.  This holds the balsa and LEDs in place, and (hopefully) softens the prop wash.

For now the GPS is mounted on the top plate under a very attractive recycled baby food container.  Still trying to decide the best way to protect the GPS module.  The red thing on the top plate is a 2 axis bubble level and doesn't fly with the quad, just there to get a good COG before takeoff.  The black loop (barely visible) coming out of the top center is zip ties allowing me to hang is from a hook to get a COG reading.

Currently running APM 2.0.42, TX is a Hitec Aurora 9 and Optima7 RX.

I purchased enough kit to add XBEE 900 telemetry, but I'm having trouble with the setup, so that will follow soon.  Also have a 1.3 GHz video kit and camera, but the TX is DOA, so that's even further out.

Flying on Turnigy 4S 4000 LiPo, I get 8~10 minutes with the goPro and some aggressive flying.

I was originally planning to build this as a hex, so at some point I'll consider ripping it apart to add more arms. 

I'm going to tweak the battery area vertical mounts to allow more room to tie down the battery on the floating plate.  Hopefully I can come up with some kind of sturdy (and somewhat quick release) allowing me to remove the bottom half of the quad during transport.

Flies great (all three times), vibration seems sufficiently dampened for the goPro.  Video coming soon.  Boss and kids effectively dampening flight operations.

Photo Credit:  Mats Gunnarsson