AirBlade Intrepid 5 Inch
By airbladeuav on Feb 20, 2019
Continuing the success of our AirBlade Intrepid line of frame, I'm giving you the AirBlade Intrepid 5 Inch. The vision for AirBlade Intrepid 5 inch is a mix-use design for freestyle and long range, with long range being the emphasis.
This frame is designed using the same philosophy as his 3 inch and 4 inch brothers, namedly
- 30x30 dual stacks with a set of 20x20 holes
- Top Mount Battery
- Removable arms
- Camera cage for maximum protection
- Built in GoPro couch
- Adjustable top plate height
The effect of incorporating all those design philosophies is that
- The dual stacks create a lot of space for electronics. You can put the 4in1 ESC on one stack and FC on the other, and have the entire space above those 2 boards for GPS, VTX, RX and more
- One of the stacks are mounted on a slot instead of holes, that means you can move the stack back and forth to fit the components you have. This is useful when you're using oversized AIO board for example.
- The additional set of 20x20 holes means you can use 20x20 FC and 30x30 4in1 ESC in the same build without needing additional hardware.
- Due to the dual stacks design, the body of the quad is longer than most designs out there. In the photo you can see that I'm using a big battery (Tattu RLine 1800mah 4S) and I only took about 75% of the available space. You can really put a bigger battery on it for those long range missions you always wanted.
- The built-in gopro couch can take GoPro Session or GoPro Hero7 without additional hardware
The build came out to 330g dry.
Enjoy!
Photos
With a bottom and top plate that long imma need a 3mm bottom plate. At this size 2mm is just too thin, gonna get trashed in crashes. Give me a 3mm option and i'll buy!
I got similar feedback during testing, but instead of going 3mm I've opted to add another set of standoff and screws in the middle of the frame which adds major support to long frame. It doens't add as much weight and it def strengthen the plate substantially.
I thought about that 4th pair of standoffs and what they would bring to the table. I have tested both options on similar 5" rigs. The 4th pair of standoffs isn't enough to keep the bottom plate from perpetually cracking, while you can make the bottom plate 3mm and NOT add the extra 2 standoffs and the plate will survive.