3689736351?profile=original

Looking around for an inexpensive, almost-ready-to-fly brushless-motor quadcopter to use a basis for indoor flight-control research, I was delighted to come across the  Altair Aerial Blackhawk.  With its extra-long extension legs and GoPro mount (which I plan use for additional sensors), the Blackhawk really fit the bill.  

As soon my Blackhawk arrived, I removed the cowl covering the fuselage, revealing the custom flight controller / receiver board shown below. I unplugged the LED leads for the headlight and four arm lights, carefully snipped the soldered-on wires with a diagonal cutter, and unscrewed the board from its mount, leaving me with the ESCs and battery leads shown in the second picture below.

3689736272?profile=original

The Blackhawk with its original flight controller

3689736219?profile=original

Original flight controller removed

As you can see, the inside bottom of the Blackhawk didn't provide a flat surface on which to mount a new controller. So I used Tinkercad to design a 3D-printable mount that I attached with E6000 adhesive.  The mount has the standard hole spacing for a 36x36mm flight controller and power distribution board (PDB).

3689736297?profile=original3D-printed mount for PDB and flight controller

Once I'd printed out the board on my Lulzbot Mini, I added some M3 nylon machine screws and spacers:

3689736245?profile=original

Then I glued the mount to the Blackhawk with a bit of E6000:

3689736422?profile=original

Next I secured the PDB to the mount with another set of spacers, soldered a new pair of heavy-gauge wires from the power supply to the PDB, soldered some female jumper leads onto the control wires going into the ESCs, soldered a pair of female jumper wires to the auxiliary power supply, and soldered the ESC power wires to the PDB.  Double-sided VHB tape helped re-secure the ESCs firmly in place:

3689736386?profile=originalFor the flight controller, I chose the inexpensive Flip32 Ominbus F3.  Its onboard battery-elimination circuit (BEC) allowed me to connect the power wires directly from the PDB, and its DSM connector made it easy to plug in my favorite receiver

For the flight-control firmware, I decided to with my own C++ Hackflight  system (which also works on Arduino-based flight controllers, as well as a flight simulator I built with UnrealEngine4.)  After testing the IMU, receiver, and motors, I attached the propellers and was ready for the maiden flight:

3689736351?profile=originalAs you can see, the LemonRX receiver fits nicely into the front of the fuselage, leaving plenty of space to attach a "companion board" like the Raspberry Pi Zero W,  NanoPi, etc. – as I hope to show in a future post!

E-mail me when people leave their comments –

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones

Comments

  • Thanks!  There's certainly a lot of exciting DIY activity going on with building-from-components, esp. in the FPV racing community, where the increasing sophistication of ESCs continues to blow my mind.  It's because of my background (computer science / AI) and meager design skills that I tend to focus on the flight controllers and sensors instead.

  • Very cool project. I wonder if "DIY" drone projects are becoming "hacker" drone projects where less fundamental research is involved in favor of re-engineering existing subsystems that are already tried and tested. The time comes when there's no point in reinventing the wheel.

This reply was deleted.