Overview

This is my custom 7" drone where I took parts from thingiverse that I liked and threw them on the TBS source one v3 frame. This was the cheaper alternative to the FR7 frame, and mounting the camera like this gives me more room on my top plate for my batteries. If my memory is correct, I beleive the 7" source one frame is quite a few grams lighter than the other ones available too.

The purpose of the drone is to chase things and fly medium range. I live not too far from a beach so I plan on doing some longer flights there, and I also live near a track for dirt bikes and a track for cars. For this reason, I have fully conformal coated everything and put the vtx and the rx in a heat shrink. I am hoping I don't run into thermal issues on the vtx. Flight times for different battery configurations with weights will be listed below.

The Important Stuff

I can run two 4s batteries, and I can always swap to 6s and use a throttle cut on the motors to step them down from 1700 kv. The battery did sag to about 4 volts after 20 seconds when only running one 1500 mah battery. There was much less sag when running 2 batteries, I got to 4 volts after about a minute. My amp readings were messed up a little bit in my osd, but i think I am drawing around 10-12 amps with the one battery set up and 12-15 amps with two batteries when crusing at about 40 mph. I flew until I hit 3.46 volts on the one pack and until 3.52 on two packs. Probably could have flown longer on the two packs, but definitely hit my limit on one pack.

I do have a 6s 4000 mah battery, but I am hesitent to throw that on my drone. I don't have a good reason why, but I am just nervous becuase of the size of the battery lol. Hoping to get into making Li-ion packs too some day when I really need to increase my flight time.

Battery    :    Flight Time   :    Weight   :    Resting Battery Voltage
4s - 1500  :       5 mins     :     974 g   :             3.65
4sx2- 1500 :      8.5 mins    :    1192 g   :             3.7

Things To Think About

The Betaflight settings were pretty easy to set up, but I will probably swap to INAV to have more reliable GPS return to home functionality. My only concern is trying to get the PIDs right, especially because I do not have any carbon under my gopro. I am hoping this does not add resonence to the frame, but Ill do my best to tune it out. Worst case is I use reelsteady, so I am not too concerned.

The GoPro mount can be put together using 25mm standoffs and some screws. A huge bonus to this print is that you can adjust the angle of the gopro and the camera. I do wish the GoPro had some more protection, but I did not feel like messing with CAD and this drone really should not be crashing too much.

This was my first time getting a runcam camera, so this one had an OSD when booting it up. I had no issues hooking up to digital control on my flight controller and removing the osd. I was happy it worked without much troubleshooting.

If you couldn't tell, I like the color orange and now just need to find the correct orange for my LEDs. The LEDs on this build were a PAIN! Took the most time to solder, but it was absolutely worth it. I was having a lot of issues with them because they were drawing too much power. Apparently these 44 LEDs draw more than 1.5 amps of power so one time after powering them up I blew the 5v regulator on my board ¯_(ツ)/¯... Shouldn't have that issue now with the 3 amp BEC.

Feel free to ask questions and point out what I could have done better!

Videos

These videos are some very light free style, probably my 4th fligtht with the drone having a single 1500 mah battery. I flew for 4 minutes because I wanted to stop around resting voltage.

Raw GoPro Hero 6 with OSD:

3D Printed Parts Not Listed in Part List (Printed by Brain3d)
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4540053 (Feet)
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4381759 (GoPro mount)
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3781093 (this is not the exact one I printed, but it is similar. Check to make sure the GPS your using fits!)

Holybro Guide (pretty much followed this exactly)
http://www.holybro.com/manual/Holybro_Kakute_F7_V1.5_Manual.pdf