Fitting the ESC to the Motors

The tips I have suggested so far have all been tried during the pre-assembly stage. I powered up the power distribution board a few days back just to check all was well before starting soldering. Unfortunately two of the LED's failed to light up.

On closer inspection one of the LED's was missing the diffuser and as they are fitted in pairs its partner failed to light. I have been pretty careful handling the board so I don't think I was to blame. I emailed Blackout in sunny Aus and they said they would send out a replacement board immediately. Great service!!

I knew it would take a while for the replacement board to show up so I ordered a replacement LED off ebay and considered a repair. The LEDs are so small I couldn't even see them without the aid of my glasses and a loupe. Damien (my son) came to the rescue and successfully replaced the broken LED so if I mess the soldering up or destroy this PDB in a crash I will have a replacement.

Here's the repaired PDB after my first job of soldering the ESC to the motors. After positioning the striped ESCs I cut the motor wires down, it didn't feel right cutting the wires so short but remember it's all about saving weight and maximising efficiency.

 The ESC have had their motor wires removed and the shrink wrapping and heat sinks. Three of them have had the +ve and ground wires removed from their connection to the CC3D board. Only one ESC BEC circuit is needed to power up CC3D board.

Next job is to fit new shrink wrap ver the bare ESCs.

And here it is. Looking nice and tidy. Soldering ESCs to the PDB up next.

Blackout Mini H Quad Camera Mount Upgrade

The Blackout Mini H Quad is designed to carry two cameras. One to provide live video to your googles or ground station via your video TX to allow fpv flight and a second to record HD in-flight video. My fpv camera has already arrived and I have already done a pre-assembly to check out the fit. The camera is a 600TVL FPV Sony Super HAD CCD board camera and it fits to a vertical CF mount sandwiched between the top CF plate and the power distribution board.

You can see the camera mount plate and mounting hardware in the above diagram. The hardware to mount the camera consists of four isolating rubber mounts and four M2 x 12mm steel bolts with nuts. The idea is to simply place the rubber mounts between the camera board and the mounting frame and then secure with the M2 bolts. I have a problem with this set-up. When the bolts are inserted the rubber mounts are under compression and the frame, bolt and camera board are all contact and the camera is not isolated by the rubber mounts. Seems a real shame as the rubber mounts are really well designed. Here's my solution....

The top bolt and nut in the above pic is the stock item. Bin them and replace with the items on the bottom row. These are M3 x 6mm nylon bolt and nut and a M2 x 6mm nylon cheese head bolt, nut and washer. The bolts are fitted, head first, into the rubber mount (middle row above).

The slotted holes in the CF camera mount plate need to be opened out a little to accept the M3 bolts.

Open the slots out at the outermost point, this lines up best with the holes in the camera board.

Insert the M2 ends of the mounts into the camera board, add a washer and secure with a M2 nylon nut.

Here's the M3 bolts inserted into the rubber mounts (head first).

Place the camera mount CF plate over the bolts and secure with M3 nylon nuts.

Here is the completed camera assembly in situ.

And above is the proof that this mount behaves far better than the original kit. The upgrade costs very little, these nuts and bolts are readily available from dealers on ebay for a couple of pounds. I have weighed the original set-up and my upgraded nylon bolt set-up and there is no difference. No brainer...

Blackout Mini H Quad Arm Bolt Upgrade

Doing a pre-assembly helps to give you a good idea of how things go together. It will also give you ideas on how to make improvements. When I say improvements I don't mean there are mistakes with the Blackout quad as supplied, like everything it is built to a price and it just depends on how much extra you want to spend during the build. The kit contains all the hardware required to assemble the frame, there are a number of M3 nylon bolts used to fix the stand-offs to the top and bottom plates. These are very light and will be sacrificial in the event of an impact (good design). There are sixteen M3 x 10mm black steel bolts and sixteen M3 nyloc steel nuts, these are used to attach the CF arms, four for each arm.

You can see how the arms attach in the above pic. My suggested upgrade is to replace these bolts, nylon would be an option but the guys at Blackout used steel for a reason, I assume for strength but at the expense of extra weight. Take a look at the next pic, it's one of the stock nuts and bolts from the kit.

Now take a look at the next pic.

Less than half the weight!! This is a titanium M3 x 10mm bolt with a M3 aluminium nyloc bolt. Remember there are sixteen bolts used to secure the motor arms so a weight saving of 8.48g.

I got the nuts off ebay, 20 for £9 delivered and the titanium bolts from Apex models for about £20 delivered. Not cheap but I think a worthwhile upgrade.

Blackout Mini H Quad Pre Assembly

By the time the quad frame had arrived from Australia (only took about 5 days) I had already got a few parts for the build. I am not going to go into technical details about all the individual parts, just a brief description of what they are and what they do. I much more enjoy the actual build process and will try to give some tips and ideas for the best way to put one of these together.

Here's a pic of the first pre-assembly. As you can see a few bits are getting their first fit. The motors are T-Motor MN1806. There were no suitable bolts supplied for mounting the motors so I used some M2 x 5mm stainless socket head screws purchased off ebay. The flight control board is Openpilot CC3D by readymaderc and the video TX is a 5.8ghz 600mw Immersionrc unit.

Inroduction

Hi, welcome to my blog about my latest hobby. I have already built one quad which pretty quickly turned in to a Hex. I will probably do some posts about it but as always I started off large scale which isn't the most practical way to go. After playing around with a cheap Udi Nano quadcopter I realised that a smaller quad was a little more useable so I started looking around for something a little better and a bit more technical.

 Above is the neat little Udi A-U839-G, loads of fun but a little basic and a little to small for outdoor use unless it's dead calm. Theres are loads of small quads and hex's out there, but it didn't take me long to settle on one.

I picked a Blackout mini H quad. Why? It looked well made, had loads of good write-ups and there was lots of info out there pertaining to the building of these quads.