Midge

By EngineerMonkey on Aug 11, 2019

5  300  1

This was probably way more complicated than a first build should have been, but I learned a lot.
SOOO, When I started, I was watching Lizard95 reviews and kind of wanted something similar but wanted to build it myself; I’ve only had the Tinyhawk S so far and it’s a blast on 2S but doesn’t feel very substantial when flying outdoors. All the reviews said the lizard was fairly good outside do to the power, size and weight.

Newbie Doesn’t know what to buy problems:

The frame is small, really small. Motor spacing front to back is almost the same as the Tinyhawk but a little wider as it’s a x instead of stretched like the little Emax. The Diatone 20x20 would not fit on the frame front to back do to its length so I had to design, and 3D print a adapter to shift the boards back so the frame would work.

This made the propellers hit the FC on the frame back, so then I had to slam the FC and ESC and 3D print motor risers to clear the the FC etc.

This left no room for the VTX and the Frsky, so that then got a 3D printed camera / electronics adapter tray made (about 4 iterations until it really worked) to wedge it all in the little upper carbon camera pod which leaves me with little to no camera protection.

Came in at 133grams with battery, tubby for its size.

The Good:

It makes me smile, haven’t even tuned the pids yet, but no hot motors or batteries. Flight time is short, haven’t timed it yet but its short. Flies like a rocket powered baseball compared to the Tinyhawk. Hovers at about 30% throttle, takes off like a scalded cat, corners like its screaming “hold on in trying to bring it around” do to its weight, and falls from the sky like an absolute rock if not watching your throttle; no float whatever.

Just guessing but I’m thinking the power to weight on full throttle is about 6:1 with what I’ve looked at for thrust tables with my parts.

8/13/19 Changed the tray design again a relocated the antennas, looks a little better and saved 3 grams over the old tray design.

Photos

Discussion

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EngineerMonkey   Aug 11, 2019  

Ok, after some betflight tuning this thing is working pretty well in my opinion, getting about 3m30s of flight time putzing around and about 2m30s doing acro and punching out alot;certainly not efficient but real fun.

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