Babyshark

By 1921 on May 26, 2018

3  275  3

I've beat this thing up a ton, still flies like a champ and is one of my most-flown quads. Front right arm is on its last legs. I have a Runcam Nano up at the front, which was a tight fit (I had to take the lens off and thread it back in after I got the camera in, and had to do some cutting with an xacto knife on the inside) but definitely an upgrade worth doing over the standard $7 BG cam. This is an earlier prototype run of the frame, so the dimensions might be a bit different from the actual production Babyshark frame. The motors were bought on $3.50/piece special off of BG, which is why this is such a cheap build. I haven't broken a motor yet, and still have 2 spares kicking around just in case.

The stack was super tight, with the skytower ESC at the bottom, the FC right above it, then the vtx03, and the XM at the top of the canopy. The 5v regulator is tucked away in front of the FC/ESC/VTX part of the stack. I direct soldered the omnibus connector to save some height in the stack (and so the loom was more flush with the canopy's profile), which was definitely worth it. The nylon m2 nuts that are holding the FC to the ESC are also hand-cut from a tall standoff to save some height in the stack.

I oriented the flytower stack so the ESC pads were protected by the canopy and the stack was generally more flush with the frame and canopy; the drawback here is that the USB is oriented at the rear of the canopy this way (which means unscrewing a bolt every time you want to connect up the quad to betaflight), and the power connector comes out the left side (which gets rubber banded to an arm for some strain relief since this is definitely a weak point of the build).

Weight is 43g, AUW ranges from 59g (300mah 2s) to 71g (450mah 2s); I could definitely save some weight by using less glue on the build, but I like the peace-of-mind that it brings with strain relief and against breakage.

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