Airworthy ?

This is where we left off. This is a side view of the CC board. We are looking from the back of the quad. You can see the battery terminal and the ESC's residing between the bottom plate and middle plate. Also gives a pretty good look at the grommets isolating the CC board and an idea of the spacing that the standoffs give me.



This is where everything gets hooked up. I took the receiver wires from the ESC's and coiled them around, then plugged them into the servo pins of the CC board. Just to keep everything straight in my mind, I plugged motor #1 onto servo #1 pins of the CC board and right on down the line. I forgot to point it out, but if you go back to one of my previous posts (Construction Moving Along) and look at the pictures starting with ESC's Stuck On, you'll see that I pulled the power wire and the ground wire from each ESC connector, put heat shrink (white) on them, them I folded them back and wrapped electrical tape (black) around them to hold them in place. I did this to ESC #2, #3 and #4. #1 I left all three wires in the connector, per the WIKI instructions. I next wired the CC board to my receiver using the supplied multi colored wire, again following the connections delineated in the WIKI. Remember the black/red wire coming up through the hole? You can't really tell in this photo, but it is plugged into my TM1000 telemetry module. The telemetry module is in turn plugged into the data port of my receiver. What I'm doing is monitoring the battery pack voltage. I'm doing this with the JST-XH connector you see next to the battery connector. This is something else I learned. I'm using a 3S battery. The balance connector on the battery (a JST-XH) has 4 pins. The two outside pins have the full battery pack voltage across them. All I did was take the mating connector, cut off the 2 middle wires and soldered my telemetry wires to the 2 outside wires, observing polarity of course. This sends the voltage of the battery pack back to my transmitter, which shows up on the front panel LCD and allows me to watch the voltage and, set a low voltage alarm in my transmitter. I'm also using this tap to power some LED lights that you'll see shortly. OK. I think that covers the main points.



IT'S ALIVE !!!!!! If you look closely, you can see the blue light on the CC board is lit and you can see the receiver lights are on. I next hooked up to my computer with a USB cable and again, following the WIKI instructions, configured my board. I went with generic settings to get me started. I'm not even going into PID settings for a while.



Here I've plugged in the JST-XH balance connector and you can see the LED lights I stuck underneath the front arms. I went with port and starboard standards, to help with in flight orientation. The second photo is taken without flash on the camera.



Props installed. 10 x 6 APC glass filled. And my handy dandy #11 keychain camera. (Remember, I said early on I was cheap). I'll put a little foam under the camera for vibration isolation, and hold it on with a wire tie.



Here she is, ready to fly (fingers crossed). You can see I've glued foam in the camera position, have a wire tie ready to go, also I put some fuel line tubing on the antennas to help hold them straight out. This is another RC trick that is supposed to give you better signal quality. I ended up with 770mm motor to motor (about 30 1/4") and an all up, ready to fly weight of 1758 grams (3lb. 14oz.). This is a pretty big hunk of machine.



Central Ohio has had a mild and fairly dry winter.......until I got my quad done. Winter has decided to return with snow and cold temperatures. I'm waiting for a little warm spell, so I can go out and test this thing. I'll keep you posted.

I hope I haven't overstepped my boundaries here. I wanted to document my build and offer it to the community, hoping maybe something I've said, done or shown has maybe helped someone else. I hope you enjoyed this blog.