A small trick to quickly mount and dismount your gimbal

Well my heatshrink finally arrived, time to get busy. The last time i flew the gimbal kind of fell apart, had to get my tools, unscrew the top housing to remove the wiring under the frame, remount everything before flying again, took about 10 minutes standing in the cold, too long...
So i wanted to find a new and quicker way of removing everything and though up something very simple, all you need are solder skills, even shitty ones like mine, a bit of cable, and two JST connectors.
The idea is to combine both + cables from the two gimbals and both - cables, connect the + them and add a wire thats long enough to reach the edge of your frame, at the end of the wire, do this with the - wire then solder a JST female plug, heatshrink the cables as you normaly would do, then add a coloured heatshrink on the outside.

The two signal wires from the gimbals are also fed up to the edge of the frame they are soldered onto a JST connector, remember to note which side is soldered where, as you will need to connect them correctly on the flight controller, i didn´t have an extra JST female, so used a power switch connecter from an old PC works fne. If you get confused and forget which was roll and pitch, plug the signal cable of the gimbal into one of the reciever ports, Throttle, yaw, ailiron or elevator, turn on your transmitter and move the sticks, your gimbals should react thus finding out which is which.

 The cables is then mounted into a JST male connector that is superglued on the frame, the left side which is the power, red for + and  black for -, has also been heatshrinked so  as not to confuse the two connectors. The right side is the signal, one for pitch, the other for roll.

The power cables are fed to your power source, in my case i have a UBEC where i branched the cables and have power for different units, like the flight controller, reciever etc.

The unit can be unmounted or mounted in 30 secs. flat

30. seconds later....

 The two superglued connectors run under the frame, the left  providing power to both gimbal and the right sendes the two signals, one for roll, the other for pitch to the flight controller.
Anyway just another crazy idea....hope you can use it....

From one novice to another

Flying a quad is not as easy as it looks, i usually go into my garden and  train my lifting off, hoovering in the same spot, then start manouvering around. As often, the quad may start to drift or i end up pulling the wrong stick so the quad goes in the wrong direction...then it suddenly ends up on its way over the hedge into the nieghbours garden...what to do panic...drop the throttle, the quad comes crushing to the ground. Upon inspection broken props again. Firstly if i flew the damn thing on an open field, then  i would have more space to learn...anyway rather than buy props from your local store, search Ebay for bulk props, they are adequate for learning and breaking and cost next to nothing, they are not very well built in comparism with other models, they are thinner and probably not balanced properly but they do help you learn to fly your quad keeping the cost at a minimum. i bought a set of 8 pcs Nylon 10x4.5"  Propellers for the sole price of $7 including postage, Hobbyking are relatively cheap on their props around $8,50, but then i have to deal with the $8 dollars charged for postage and the fact that the European warehouse often has no stocks available. My local store charges about $6 per prop, pretty steep price for learning to fly a quad.

Read extensive prop reviews and buy expensive props and propeller balancers once you have become an expert, until then save the money...

 Take a guess.. one prop is from Ebay and is made in China, the other is a Hobbyking version

The red prop is the Ebay version, it has a thinner blade, holds up quite well despite the price and the quality.

Powering your system with a UBEC

I use a UBEC to power the MultiWii pro, my two servos on the gimal and the reciever. I ordered two switchable UBECs off Ebay for $5, i am going to use the one UBEC to power the flight controller and the other to control the two gimbals on a separate battery.

There are different types of UBECS available but this one can be used and regulated between 5v and 6v and can be used with 2s up to 6s lipos. converts from 5.5volts to 26 volts into a constant voltage of either 5volts or 6 volts depending on the jumper setting. You could off coarse use your ESC to power your board, (if yours are still working in contrast to mine) but there is a chance that using the ESC´s you might draw too much power, making your multi-rotor fall out the sky if the flight controller powers off. Have  a look at this video that explains how a BEC works http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgXP4__GjSo

Firstly i found that most lipo batteries come with differnt connectors, JST, Dean, EC3, EC5, XT60 connectors and its quite a hassle converting from one to the other, i myself started using XT60 connectors and i bought a stack of XT60 connectors from China through Ebay they are pretty cheap and you will be amazed how often you need to use on of these connectors. I am no expert on lipo batteries but check out this guys page http://www.rchelicopterfun.com/rc-lipo-batteries.html he will tell you what there is to know on Lipos, chargers and the works. Read the safety precations on using lipo´s almost at the end of his article. he explains how not to puff your battery, but also what could happen if you are not cautious,.

Anyway i converted all my batteries with XT60 connectors, You can of coarse buy converters, they will convert from one to the other in a jiffy, but i am a true DIY man, so soldering is the thing i prefer to try and end up fucking it all up in due process. when soldering the connectors on and off take care not to short your battery in anyway, otherwise, puff and the thing grows to 4 times its size, gives you some awful smelling smoke and a fucked up battery (tried that too), lucky for me the thing never caught fire. So if you are newbie like me take great care and as i mentioned earlier read the advice posted in the link above.

What i initially learnt was to solder one cable at a time, cut the red, solder and then heatshrink it before moving on to the next wire, this way the chances of shorting are minimal.

I grabbed the UBEC and soldered a XT60 connector on the OUTPUT wire, remember to get the polarity right, red on +, black on - otherwise puff, another fucked up battery.

I cut  off the connector and striped the wire, found two red and two black wires

 Soldered the extra set of red wires together.

 soldered the two blacks together

Soldered the black/negative cable with the black/negative from the UBEC and the red/positive with the red/positive wire.

 Should look a bit like this, but with better soldering skills.

 Mounted the connector i had cut off again , had to find an extra connector to mount on the other cable.

 I have run out of heatshrink, this does a much neater job than duct tape, but this will do for now, notice that i now have two connectors available each giving five volts, you could make additional connectors if needed, i only need two, one for my reciever and one for the MWII flightcontroller.

 I connected the one connector into the Orange DSM2 through the BATT/BIND port, the middle rail has to be red/+ and the bottom black/- leaving the top signal rail empty.

On the last connector i took one of the signal wires from any of the 4 ESC´s and plugged it in to the empty slot next to the red/+ wire

Plugged the connector into the MultiWii pro board, in my case i used D5 which is motor 3, the red and black provide power to the MultiWii board and the green is the signal cable to the ESC from the MultiWii Pro board. Remember the inner rail is signal, middle is + and bottom is - on the Hobbyking MultiWii pro board.

A nifty tool for building multi-rotors

If you want to save yourself the hassle of  using all kinds of ways in keeping your wires stable when soldering, get yourself this nifty helping hand, you can order this at your local store or find on Ebay for about $10, from Asia, takes about 30 days but worth the wait.

A large part of my quadcopter was built trying to solder without a helping hand and how i regret, takes half the time to solder with this instrument, more precise and less fustration. Not that my soldering techniques are any good, but they seem to have upped a bit using this tool.

MultiWii Pro controller

Being a newbie, it took quite a while to figure out the cabling required to make this all work, i originally had a Crius all in one Pro version 2.0 that i bought from unmannedtech.co.uk, the documentation was very sparse and much of it was DIY, so i ended up shorting the board as i fed voltage at a wrong connection and one of the copper threads burnt out, i eventually ordered a new one from rctimer.com

but that got stuck in the postal office somewhere in singapore, not wanting to wait another month i then ordered a HK MultiWii pro, i later repaired the broken board by soldering a wire between the burnt out circuit making the board usable again, and a month later the new Crius board arrived, so i now have flight controllers for three quads. In this section i will look at my cabling, as i mentioned i am no expert in this field, this is plain DIY and many things can be done differently, so let me know if thats the case.

As in the above picture the top section of the board is used to mount the motors and the Gimbal. Pin 44is the pitch of the gimbal and pin 45 is the roll of the gimbal. I only connected the signal cable of both gimbals as i am currently working a separate powering for the Gimbal to avoid brown outs, more on that later, i have not yet put shrink tube nor a pin connector still waiting for it to arrive.

Pins D2 through to PinD6 are used to connect the motors, if you are making a Hexacopter pins D7 and 8 would be used as well, but since this is a quad i am only using 2 to 6. Here i connected the signal cable from the ESC only, this has to be connected on the pin closest to the white arrow. Ok time for new year party back later

Ok happy new to you all, hope you all had a fantastic evening and a great party. Well mine was not to bad, though i left the partying out, the evening was great.

Pin 9 and 10 I used for connecting the HC-SR04 sonar distance sensor more on that later.

Connecting the motors on the copter all depends on what you are building in my case i have an X frame quad so i downloaded the manual from HK and got the setup from there.

I placed the quad in the flying direction with the arrow pointing forward and found the equivelant setup, so in my case D2 on the MultiWii board i placed the left front motor, D3 the back right motor, D4 the front right motor and D5 the back left motor. I only used the signal cable from each ESC as i used a seperate UBEC to power my system.

After i accidently shorted my ESC, I cut the positive and ground wire off leaving only the signal wire, the ESC still functions in powering and regulating the motor. 

On the otherside of the MultiWII pro, i connected the signal cables to my reciever.

here my story is the same as before i only need to connect the signal wire (most inner rail where the green cable is connected and not the + and ground rails as my reciever is also powered by my UBEC. The thing that i so far have learnt is that i had to search many sites and read many articles before finding out how to have it all down correctly, for instance my reciever uses the terminology "Throttle, Alieron, Elevator, Rudder", the Crius AIOP (all in one pro) uses the terminolgy "Throttle, Roll, Pitch and Yaw", now it actually took some time to find the out which was which, in actual fact for a moment i was wondering wether google had gone offline. Anyway for all of you, like me who can´t master the power of seaching in Google, Roll is Alieron, Pitch is Elevator and Yaw is Rudder, i later found out that the Alieron, elevator and rudder terminolgy is used for RC planes and the counter when building multi-rotors.

Back to the connecting the reciever and HK MultiWii, when i downloaded the official documentation off Hobbykings site i noticed a slight differance, i am not actually sure which revision my board is, but the official documentation states that the outer pin is the signal cable and the inner pin is the GND, this is not correct, the INNER rail is the signal, so just one more reason to gret confused. I connected my reciever with the corresponding cables. The top row on my reciever is the signal pins, my reciever is powered using a UBEC on the BATT/BIND this port i originally used to pair my reciever and transmitter, apart from that i use it to power the Rx, the middle rail has the + connection and the bottle rail has the GND.

Throttle on the signal pin of the reciever to A8 on the HK MultiWii

Alieron/roll on the signal pin of the reciever  A9 on the HK MultiWii

Elevator/Pitch on the signal pin of the reciever A10 on the HK MultWii

Rudd/Yaw on the signal pin of the reciever A11 on the HK multiWii

The Gear and the Aux1,  i believe i connected to get some extra functions out of my transmitter, but not sure have to check out why.

Well time for some live championshipcommentary Reading vs. Forest COYR

Halford does it again!!!

Hobbyking X650F Glass Fiber Quadcopter Frame

The zip tie around the frame was initially placed to hold the gimbal frame in place when i glued it together.

Hobbyking X650F Glass Fiber Quadcopter Frame 550mm, a great frame if you want to hide your cabling, I am a newbie at this stuff, but with this frame I was able to solder an extension cable on my ESC and feed them through the tube together with the LED all the wiring was then done under the frame of the X650F and the cables are visable as it is covered by the battery.

An idea i used was to take an old useless power supply from a PC and use the cables to extent the ESC, LED's and the yellow cables i used as signal wires from the MULTIWII pro down through the tube to the ESC.

I ran out of shrink tube so i had to use duct tape for some of the cabling, i ordered a box of assorted shrink tube from ebay, so patiently awaiting the package so i can redo the wiring. 

'

Mounted a gimbal, the left most wires but have to be redone as i plan on powering the gimbal on a separate battery to avoid brown-out, the first time i mounted the gimbal and connected it to the flight controller it caused the flight controller to lose power and restart due to the gimbal pulling to much power.

Three levels under the hood the bottom is the power distribution, you have to find a piece if plastic/plywood drill four holes equivelent to the holes in the power board. The plasticplywood has to then be mounted under the frame so you can tie the board down. I put M3 plastic screws through the bottom mounting the holding brackets, mounted the flight controller then tightened it down with plastic screws.

The plywood mounted at the bottom of the frame, so i was able to mount power distribution board on the first level, without this there would be no space for it.

Used some foam to tie down the GPS, bluetooth and the Rx/Tx glued the foam on to the frame, then put some glue on some of the chips and glued that to the foam, i am not an electrician and don´t really know about these kind of things but i avoided glueing the whole printboard, i was a bit worried that it could end up shorting the GPS, so for me glueing a few of the chips was enough to hold it in place.

The LED mounted around the frame, it actulally closes the gap so the wires under the frame are not visable, got the front and back with LEDs for directional purposes with red and blue LED from HK

The original product was a 12 dollar gimbal off HK, http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.aspidProduct=36495, was a pain putting together the mounting holes were small and didn´t fit their counter parts, so had to pry the holes with a screwdriver.

Was a nuisance to put together, the mounting holes were small so they had to be remade using a screwdriver and pryed the holes a bit larger, then had to use a dab of superglue to make the whole thing stay stabil. After a while had to get rid of the top section of the camera holder as it restricted movement on the roll axis, the original gimbal could not pitch very much so i decided to reconstruct the gimbal, brought a park servo and mounted and glued it with the top section, used a set of pliers to cut a bit of the back section off, this could have been avoided if i had mounted the gimbal further back as there is a lot of space by the mount point, i further revised it (not shown in the picture) by stabilisig the back with a round gimbal mount. It is glued to the gimbal frame and the mount bracket is on the back section acting as a bearing.Look further done for more pictures of the bearing.

A generel weak spot on the Hobbyking X650F is the motor mount nut top right hand corner, it tends to give way, when the quad crashes thus eating its way into the carbon fiber, this is probably a good thing in some sense, if it didn´t give way, then could probably crack the frame, will try to place a washer between the frame and nut so at least it doesn´t wear out the carbon fiber. (tells you what a shitty pilot i am).

'

I cut the signal wire and mounted an extenseion through the tube, since i had shorted my ESC so they don´t supply power that i could use to power the MultiiWii pro board, i instead used a UBEC for that bit, the blue and the black cabel is the LED that i also extended and fed through the tube.

The ESC are fed through the holes at the bottom of the motor mount, then connected to the motor.

All the cables are then pushed into the space and zip tied together with the ESC at the bottom giving you a nice finish.

Mounting the Gimbal was done by using some foam glued to the X650F frame drilled two extra holes on the Gimbal frame and fed two Zip ties on either side, tightened them just enough so that i can remove it when not needing to use the Gimbal, so kind of slides on and off, it does tend to fall off during crashes but i will think of someway to take care of that.

As i mentioned earlier i used the round gimbal mount to act as a bearing on the back section of the Gimbal, this helps when carrying a camera and stabilizes the back gimbal in a neutral position. Have not yet tested its performance, but will probably be useless, but what the heck, it´s fun to make.