I'm new to the hobby and was getting tired of toothpick style frames with expensive and fragile aio boards that burn up easily and were hard to mount aftermarket vtxs and receivers to. I had pretty good luck with my larva X and got 50+ flights out of it, after my third aio board, one warranteed and one purchased. I decided to upgrade after breaking a lot of stuff. I liked the way the larva x flew but it was a little light and was hard to fly under stuff. I wanted a stack setup, with separate boards that you can replace inexpensively. I also wanted to use the same spare parts I had for my larva x. Thats when I found the tadpole frame. It looked a little heavier and provided much more protection and room for mounting electronics. My favorite type of flying is a combination of flow, cinematic and freestyle flying so I wanted stable electronic with a capacitor, a good vtx and antenna, a strong and light frame able to take some crashes, while still being light and agile enough for acrobatic stunts.

I used all off the shelf components and I planned on reusing some spare parts from the larva x, but I ended up only using the propellers, lol. I do have a complete set of larva x motors and a camera as spares though. I redrilled the 16x16 stack holes so they were centered in the frame because the motor wires were too short to reach the rear motor plugs. I also needed to carve away the top plate a little bit so the rear stack bolts can protrude into the area where the top plate was. I didnt want to grind down my bolts, and this seems like it might provide an added benefit of not letting the bolts rack too far forward or backwards in a crash. The 16v 470 capacitor is soldered on the esc at the battery leads and is nestled in between the top plate cutout so it is prevented from moving around too much. I've crashed it about 4 times in mild crashes and no damage so far other than chewed up props. The antenna mount is pretty slick too. My antenna had a very slender wire so I put about 4 or 5 layers of shrink wrap around the wire. When you bolt the top plate on, it pretty firmly grips the wire and holds the antenna in place pretty well. For the 2.4G ELRS antenna I used two zip ties, one sticks the antenna away from the quad a bit, and the other zip tie hooks in little notches on the antenna and around the other zip tie. The ELRS reviever is shrink wrapped and zip tied to the bottom plate behind the stack.

I've been flying a lot with this setup, the 2 blade props have a lower pitch than most of the 3 blade props out there so they are more forgiving to throttle inputs making it easier to fly in tight spaces, and it still has pretty good punch when you need it. I have a bunch of mismatched 3s packs, 2 homemade from 300mah gnb , a 3s made from 3 nanohawk batteries, and an rdq lihv 380 mah, an apex 520 lipo, and gnb lihv 600 and 660 batteries. The 520 and 660 mah weigh 49 grams and are too big for sure, it flys but hovering is around %50-60 throttle. With the 44 gram 600 mah it flys ok with but a little heavy and the flight time is almost 10 minutes of full throttle punching acro flying. With the homemade 300mah 3s I'm getting 3 to 4 minutes of flight time and the 380 mah is closer to 4:30. The GNB lihv 44 gram 600 mah is cool because it weighs about he same as the 42 gram GNB LIHV 450 and 520 mah batteries, so why not fly it? I think the 26 gram 380 mah battery is the one that provides the best performance flying while also providing 4+ minutes of flight time.

Just under 70 grams without battery, under 96 grams with 3s 380 mah battery and under 114 grams with 3s GNB 600 lihv battery.