Building a Quadcopter

[Grunilg]

Drones, Quadcopters, UAVs, call them however you like are the RC-"Toys" atm.
While there are many good Ready-to-Fly options out there, i decided to build one myself and I'd like to take you along on the ride.

The parts:
-Versacopter V2.0 H-Frame
-4x Emax MT2204 2300kv Motors
-4x Emax 12A ESCs
-Naze32 10DOF Flightcontroller
-Taranis X9D+ Transmitter
-X8R Receiver
-4x 6045 Gemfan Propeller

 

The Build:

Spoiler

Soldering the ESCs and Battery Lead:


Building the sides and inserting Carbon Tubing:



Installing the Motors (the wrong way):



Another hour (forgot to take pictures) passed:

Almost done, still some calibration to be done. Weight w/o battery: 462g/16,3oz (for you filthy imperials)

I'll spare you the tedious calibration via Cleanflight on PC, nothing of note happened there.

Well, today the weather cleared up a little and i finally got to try it out. "Why not inside?", you might ask: Well, i don't like having all the paper in my room flying about and value my fingers more (go ahead and google (NSFW "prop injury"))than waiting a little extra.
Well, it turned out I did not fasten one of the nuts well enough and it flew off into the garden, never to be found again, meaning i have to wait another week to get CCW M5 Nuts.

Things to be done:
-Waiting for my CCW-Nuts
-Maidening it for real

-FPV-Setup

Well, that's it for this part of the build, updates will follow along the path.
Thank you for reading and you shall be allowed to ask questions now

[TheGhzGuy]

1 minute ago, Grunilg said:

Drones, Quadcopters, UAVs, call them however you like are the RC-"Toys" atm.
While there are many good Ready-to-Fly options out there, i decided to build one myself and I'd like to take you along on the ride.

The parts:
-Versacopter V2.0 H-Frame
-4x Emax MT2204 2300kv Motors
-4x Emax 12A ESCs
-Naze32 10DOF Flightcontroller
-Taranis X9D+ Transmitter
-X8R Receiver
-4x 6045 Gemfan Propeller

The Build:


I'll spare you the tedious calibration via Cleanflight on PC, nothing of note happened there.

Well, today the weather cleared up a little and i finally got to try it out. "Why not inside?", you might ask: Well, i don't like having all the paper in my room flying about and value my fingers more (go ahead and google (NSFW "prop injury"))than waiting a little extra.
Well, it turned out I did not fasten one of the nuts well enough and it flew off into the garden, never to be found again, meaning i have to wait another week to get CCW M5 Nuts.

Things to be done:
-Waiting for my CCW-Nuts
-Maidening it for real

Hidden Content

-FPV-Setup

Well, that's it for this part of the build, updates will follow along the path.
Thank you for reading and you shall be allowed to ask questions now

Oh that's very cool! Nicely done! I'll be making a drone soon as well, just with a Raspberry Pi instead.

[Grunilg]

2 minutes ago, TheGhzGuy said:

Oh that's very cool! Nicely done! I'll be making a drone soon as well, just with a Raspberry Pi instead.

Well, that sounds like a unique project. Hope it'll work out for you, i honestly can't imagine a quadcopter being controllable wothout gyro and accelarometer.

[TheGhzGuy]

1 minute ago, Grunilg said:

Well, that sounds like a unique project. Hope it'll work out for you, i honestly can't imagine a quadcopter being controllable wothout gyro and accelarometer.

It's hooked up to this http://www.emlid.com/shop/navio-plus/ So that's how it has those two things. It has been fun so far. Hopefully I can migrate the tech down to the ground to carry my backpack for me.

[Hackentosher]

On 3/3/2016 at 9:44 AM, TheGhzGuy said:

Oh that's very cool! Nicely done! I'll be making a drone soon as well, just with a Raspberry Pi instead.

Are you doing that just to say you have a raspberry pi controlled quad? If not, that sounds like one hell of a pain when the Naze is super easy to deal with.

 

OP, I'll pass on some lessons I learned from my recent 280 vtail quad (rip): make sure your battery is in a good position for CG. use the right length screws for your motors that don't enter the housing. This will probably end up killing the motors and it won't be covered by warranty (rip one and maybe a second cobra 2204). Lastly, if you're flying in angle or horizon mode, make sure the correction force under the PID tab in clean flight isn't turned up to high or you will have really bad oscillations. It didn't help that my CG was way of, but it's something I learned.

 

But yeah, it looks really good, can't wait to see the maiden!

[TheGhzGuy]

48 minutes ago, Hackentosher said:

Are you doing that just to say you have a raspberry pi controlled quad? If not, that sounds like one hell of a pain when the Naze is super easy to deal with.

 

OP, I'll pass on some lessons I learned from my recent 280 vtail quad (rip): make sure your battery is in a good position for CG. use the right length screws for your motors that don't enter the housing. This will probably end up killing the motors and it won't be covered by warranty (rip one and maybe a second cobra 2204). Lastly, if you're flying in angle or horizon mode, make sure the correction force under the PID tab in clean flight isn't turned up to high or you will have really bad oscillations. It didn't help that my CG was way of, but it's something I learned.

Well, I'm using it 1. Because why not? 2. Increased capability. 3. Because it has been done many times already

[Hackentosher]

3 hours ago, TheGhzGuy said:

Well, I'm using it 1. Because why not? 2. Increased capability. 3. Because it has been done many times already

alrighty, you do you

[Grunilg]

Well, it's been a while, but the nuts finally arrived and the weather cleared up, so here we go:

Setup:

Actioncam to record the flight, Voltmeter to notify me of when the battery's empty.
 

A little unstable upon decending. May be a combination of Vortex-Ring-State and poor finetuning on my part.

[ClownFace1511]

I'm more of a DJI drone type of guy but this is pretty cool self made project.