The XCopter Quad build - Week two

Maxx's Stuff

Hi and welcome to Maxx's Stuff, I'm Maxx and this is my stuff!

In today's world, I manage to have some time to learn, play, discover and tinker with new things and I get to share all that with you.

XCopter Micro Quad Build - Week two

The List.

As promised, the list of items that I will need to purchase to complete this project. All components are available from Hobby King.
Micro Quad PCB frame
HobbyKing Multi-Rotor Board
Four 2900kv Outrunner motors
Four 6A ESC's
5030 props, CW and CCW
Two 800Mah 2s LiPo batteries
Four Male to Male server leads.
2mm screws
2mm nuts
Nylon spacers
Battery Velcro

Other stuff that is needed but is also used for other planes in the fleet.
LiPo battery charger/balancer
BESC progamming card
USB programming lead for HobbKing radios
USBasp AVR programmer
720p video camera

Tools
Turnigy hex driver set
Turnigy hex socket set

Other tools and gear needed that I already have
four channel transmitter and reciever (I am going to use my HobbyKing 6 channel set)
Soldering iron
Solder
Solder Flux (Even if you use cored solder, I still recomend using addition flux)
Hot glue gun and glue.
Screw drivers

Quite a list eh ...

The XCopter Quad build - Week two.

Week two is the programming board and got it to my door for $17.98 (average so far of $19.48). It comes well packed as shown in the pictures, and many hobbiests recommend that the packaging can be used to reduced vibration when mounted into your multi rotor. It is good soft, rigid material and this would be a good use, but it will not fit under the arcs of the micro quad, so I may use a small part of the packing material only as washers, and on if needed, I plan to mount the board on nylon spacers and hope this will suffice, we shall see.


The board is powered by the Atmega 168, making it an 8 bit CPU with 16Kbytes of Flash RAM. It runs at 20MHz and is an industrial grade RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) based CPU, great for our application of stabilising Multi Rotor Copters. With the USBasp programmer in can be flashed with any program. I am planning on loading an XCopter  configuration, where this controller comes with the +Copter configuration pre loaded. The best way to describe an XCopter is you have two rotors at the front, and two rotors at the rear. A Plus configuration has one rotor to the front, one rotor to the rear, with a rotor to the starboard (Right) and another to the port (left).

I was quite excited how well the board fitted into the Micro Quad frame as pictured. You will see it is mounted for a X configuration (the two small arrows at the corner point to the front), but the board also fits perfectly for a + configuration as well. I am hoping the nylon spacers will be high enough for the receiver to fit underneath. The receiver is 12mm high, but the connections are on top, so there might be some creative work required. Hobby King have some 21mm spacers and the receiver is 21mm wide, so that might be a possible solution. The radio I will be using is the Hobby King six channel 2.4GHz (mode 2).

Once I get the programming lead, which will be included in the costs of this build, I will be flashing the card to the XCopter configuration. I will be doing this through Linux, so if your a Linux user and would like know how to do this, hopefully the up coming blog will help.

So at this point, I have the Micro Quad frame and the controller board. But I did do some research and Flite Test have a great video on setting up the controller board on a Quad copter that I suggest you check out if you are just starting in multi rotors like myself.

Next week I get the camera, a pocket sized 720p hi definition video camera that will be going on the Quad as well.

 Ĝis revido amikojn! (Until then friends!)

P.S.
after writing this blog, before publication, Hobby King now provide the Micro Quad with everything except the battery and radio for $99.99