TAD Pimp'd! 3 Inch Tadpole

By ꓘamiKwadze on Oct 05, 2020

8  647  7

!!!!WARNING: Making your quad look pretty adds unneeded weight and makes crashes far more painful!!!

So, strangely I realized that I hadn't yet built a real Armattan, a clone, yes, but not a real Armattan. I found myself inspired by Skywakka FPV's tadpole build and decided to build my own. Armattan is pretty darn amazing...I ordered directly from Taiwan and had the frame 5 days later!!
The jhemcu 30A is way overkill, but the 20A wasn't available state-side when I bought it and I wasn't going to wait for the slow boat. I am barely pulling 18A on aggressive powerloops though. At one point in the maiden flight I clipped a tree branch and thought that I surely lost a motor or toasted an esc, but nope, so maybe 30A isn't that bad.
The blue guards on the camera cage were created by a carefull dipping into Task15, a very tough polyurethane. Shorter cams like the runcam racer fit perect in this frame, but nano cams like the caddx and foxeer stick out a few mm's. The polyurethane got the cage out just past the lens.
When I was finished with this build, I thought I was going to be too heavy (again), especially looking at all the other Tad builds on here. Surprisingly this is not at all the case. This turned out to be one of the best quads I've ever flown. It is literally a mini 5 inch. Another thing to note, is it so much quieter than my other quads. My maiden flight with this was 4 minutes on the R-Line 550mah with moderate to agressive freestyle. Ok, so it should have been more like 3:30 minutes...I was having so much fun I accidentally ran the battery down to 3.3v per cell...luckily the battery seems ok so far.

Photos

Discussion

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Spagatti   Feb 16, 2021  
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Spagatti   Apr 03, 2021 

Thank you so much, have you got also the stl which you used to hold the antenna?

Proppedupfpv   Apr 03, 2021 

Bro, Nice work!
Giving the Tadpole a hard look. how does it fly? Pros/Cons?

ꓘamiKwadze   May 15, 2021 

The antenna piece is just the one that comes with the tadpole. I have more than a few quads at this point and the 3 inch tadpole, with this setup, is in my top 3 favorites. Even though my build is a little heavier than some on here, it doesn't feel heavy in the least. I have no complaints about this build or this frame, it flies like a quad should. It is fast, it is responsive, and you do feel like your tearing up the sky...not to mention, the flight time, even flying hard, is impressive. I punish this thing and it eats it up.

ssmcd   Oct 15, 2020  

Very nice. Are the motor mounts just scaled down from the Marmotte/dger STLs?

ꓘamiKwadze   Dec 20, 2020 

I'm not entirely sure. I downloaded some stl models from Thingiverse and sent them over to RaceDayQuads for printing.

Jawsromerow   Nov 20, 2020  

That thing is Pimped out son.

Vishera   Oct 11, 2020  

what size paracord did you use?

ꓘamiKwadze   Oct 12, 2020 

Vishera, I used 550 paracord. It's about 4mm in diameter, about 6-7mm flattened, and fits perfect for the wires on this motor class. You can fit 6mm of motor wire through them max without too much effort.

Sasquads   Oct 05, 2020  

Good job
Nice colors, just as I like mine
Plain black is so 2019....

ꓘamiKwadze   Oct 12, 2020 

Thanks a bunch. Needed something easy to find in the fall foliage, lol!

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