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%).
Comments
If the motor is slightly bend you will find that you might get some undesirable yaw. it really depends on the direction the motor get tilted to. it was not that big a deal, as Arashi says, you just bend it back and your back in the game again. but if you dont know about it, you can get really frustrated trying to figure out what happening.
@Michal - I use the same arm material, but just mounted the motors directly on top of the arm with the screws extending all the way through the arm. This will give it more strength, so you won't have to worry about any weakening from the c-clip clearance hole between the motor mount holes.
In a hard landing, sometimes my motor will get a little angled. A little off doesn't matter, if they are really off, I just bend the arm back to square with some pliers. It is very durable.
hi brian, please explain it. how exact do the motors have to be? i did not want to mount it like this, but the motor has a 1mm long protruding axis and i didnt want to weaken the arm with a 8mm hole between the 3mm holes wich are only 16mm apart (that stupid motor has 16x16mm motor mount distances, not the usual 16x19mm.
Michal.
very nice looking build. it looks like you mounted you motors the same as i did for my first custom build. Just a little heads up, I had to check my motors for trueness after any little mishaps. if you keep an eye on your motors you will have no troubles.
cheers and good luck!
Very nice build, good luck with your flight tests.
Thats a nice and neat build :)
UT