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 six
This week I got the last outrunner and two more ESC's at $30.57 from Hobby King. Brings the average to $28.71. I thought I would use the week to prep up the solder joints and the three ESC's (fourth in the next week). I measured out roughly the length of wire needed on the ESC three phase side. Because the outrunners need to go in a certain direction, I plan to do any direction change with the motor connections so the ESC connections can remain fairly neat. For those who may not know, to change the direction of brushless motors, you just nee to swap two of the three phases, I will most likely get into more detail when I start running up the Quad.
I have "tinned" the connections on the frame, the ESC and motor wires. I had to use cored solder as my flux has dried right out, and it is a trip to either Morwell or Warragul to get more, and I could not be bothered driving to Morwell, or waiting until Monday to get some from Warragul (I work in Warragul). But the cored stuff came out good as can be seen in the picture.
I use an old scope iron with 2mm tip. It managed to tin everything o.k. and I think it will be quite adequate when I put it all together. Flite test have put a review up of the Micro Quad. This is the one from Hobby King for $99.99, a bit cheaper than what I am spending, but I am enjoying the weekly products and doing little bits of research, but next week I will be showing some real building.
The latest "The list" update.
I Now need to get the USB programming lead for the Hobby King 6ch radio. This will get included in the price, but come under the "For other aircraft in the fleet", I think I can still remain on target, but I am really pushing the $30 for ten weeks. Hopefully I will get a video out about how to program the HobbyKing radio on Linux, or find a good one online.
Anyhow, hope you enjoyed the video, do a search on Youtube for the Micro Quad, there are some great videos, including this one with a crash.
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
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.
Maxx's Stuff
I measured out roughly the length of wire needed on the ESC three phase side. Because the outrunners need to go in a certain direction, I plan to do any direction change with the motor connections so the ESC connections can remain fairly neat. For those who may not know, to change the direction of brushless motors, you just nee to swap two of the three phases, I will most likely get into more detail when I start running up the Quad.
