roninUAV - Ronin Mk1 179 sub-250g Freestyle (4")

By the.ronin on May 20, 2021

15  508  6

As many of you likely have experienced, I always felt that even my most favorite frame was missing something. I'd always wish I could take this aspect from that frame and that aspect from this frame to create what I'd consider the most prefect frame. It got to a point where I decided to just start designing and selling my own frames. And this is my first release - the Ronin Mk1. The Ronin being my freestyle category of frames and the "mark 1" designating it as the first release version.

One day I was looking at my wall of drones, as one does. And realized that by far I flew my smaller 3 inch drones more than anything. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing like the feeling of a tuned in 5" Apex 6S ripper. But living in the metropolitan Los Angeles area, I'd have to drive somewhere to properly fly the thing. Whereas with my smaller drones, I was much more confident ripping it up at local parks. This is why I decided to focus on ultra-light sub-250g oriented frames. Oh and then there's the whole FAA thing too I guess lol.

I will be straight up - I designed this frame with flight performance as top priority. Specifically, I wanted it to be rigid enough to show a very clean gyro_scaled. This is actual gyro_scaled spectrographs of this build:

Alt Tag

Alt Tag

But once I achieved this noise profile which in turn allows for very aggressive tuning, I turned all my attention to weight mitigation. Put another way, I sacrificed some degree of durability to ensure flight performance and flight time ensuring a sub-250g AUW.

With a 179mm MTM wheelbase, this build spins 4" props with 1404 motors making use of an F7 AIO and split 4K HD camera, this build clocks in at 240g with an 850mAh 4S lipo clocking in well in excess of 4 min hard acro as you can see in this video ...

Photos

Discussion

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Nikotttin   May 26, 2021  
1

Great great great design!!!
This is something. Thanks for sharing!

the.ronin   May 26, 2021 

Thank you man!! Just wait till we drop the Shinobi Mk1 (endurance), the Samurai Mk1 (racing), the Ashigaru Mk1 (cine), and the Daimyo Mk1 (long range) ... all in development as we speak :)

jasperfpv   May 25, 2021  
1

Great build and flying man.
I just got my frame and plan to get some flights in this weekend if the weather lets up.

the.ronin   May 25, 2021 
1

Sick!! Thanks again for all your help with the kanji on these frames, jasper!!!

Joshua_A   May 22, 2021  
1

LOVE IT!!
Do you have any idea what your thrust/weight ratio is?

the.ronin   May 22, 2021 
1

Thanks! There are no specs for these F1404's with 4" but assuming 3" thrust specs of call it 250g at just above half throttle, that's about 4x at least on paper. That's why I was so focused on gyro_scaled cos I knew if I could nail that, I could push D term to really mitigate prop wash without having to push the filtering.

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