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.

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.