This was a frame-swap build, to scratch the build itch whilst keeping the expenses down. Plus I wanted to try something.

I have been flying my Acrobrat less and less, and this is partly because it has ended up being a bit of an awkward configuration. When I first built it, I put motors on it that were far too small and fast, and it just killed the battery. So I replaced those, but I rather over-compensated, and ended up with motors that were a bit too big. And so performance killed efficiency and vice veras with that machine. It was really pretty darned good, but perhaps a bit less fun than it should have been.

I got to thinking that perhaps 4" props might be something to try - would they better suit the 1507 motors...? Obviously you can't squeeze 4" props onto the Acrobrat, so it was time for a frame transplant, and as my favourite 3" machine is a Gecko, well, the Gecko 4 seemed a good choice. Plus I have seen some nice Gecko 4 builds on here, and I am very easily led.

The transfer of parts was easy enough, although I couldn't get away with leaving the motors as they were; I had to unsolder and swap them about to get the right lead length. And of course there needed to be some TPU parts printed, so the whole project took a couple of evenings, but required minimal effort and came out quite clean. Also all of the mass is closer to the centre in this frame, which has got to be a good thing. Plus there was no tedious firmware updates, multiple bindings, or BetaFlight setup - everything was already bound and configured, so I just changed the craft name, reset the sliders and was good to go. Which was actually very nice; setting up a DJI quad for the first time takes an awful lot of watching progress bars creep across the screen...

I got to take it out this afternoon for a quick test flight, and it is apparent that it needs a bit of a tune - there is some rattle going on at higher throttle, and was that some bounce-back there? So a bit of work still, but for a first outing, this is looking encouraging. At first go around, I would say that already it is flying better than the Acrobrat - it's not a major difference, but it's a bit quicker, and the sqatter form-factor makes it a bit snappier. And I did get a bit more efficiency, it's looking like I will get just under an extra minute in the air out of an 850mAh 4S. So I think this has been a worthwhile sidegrade, upgrade, brain transplant, recycling, whatever project.

Maiden Flight