Mockup

Brushless Whoop v1

By cjang on Feb 16, 2018

0  266  0

To learn about quads, I decided to put together a brushless whoop from scratch. Please excuse the shitty soldering (I have never done any electronics work in my life).

I wanted something small (~65mm), light, and ducted, but I couldn't find an appropriate frame that could natively handle a brushless FC and motors. Richard Mulhern was kind enough to throw together a design for a TPE adapter that allows mounting of 16x16 stacks to a 26x26 whoop frame.

Working with these tiny components and soldering everything together in such close quarters was a complete pain in the fucking ass, but an enjoyable challenge at the same time.

2/9/2018: Plugged a 1S lipo into the FC/ESC stack that I managed to complete. It didn't blow up! It works! Betaflight Configurator recognizes the FC and I updated the firmware after some driver issues. Gyro seems to work OK.

2/16/2018: Soldered the motor wires to the ESC. Three motors are functional (!) but one just twitches (!!!). Took apart the cube to check the connections and everything seems to be OK. Checked for continuity between the FC and ESC and it looks OK as well. Manual rotation of the prop on the defective motor seems a lot harder than the rest, leading me to believe that this bullshit is due to a motor problem. I know I can connect one of the other motors on there to confirm, but the soldering work on this thing is such a pain due to the quad's miniscule size. I am contacting the manufacturer of the motors to see if they are willing to send a replacement. Otherwise, I can confirm with a servo that I have lying around later. Very frustrating (but awesome that I got 3 motors working!)

2/17/2018: Resoldered the motor to the ESC just for the hell of it and it seems to be working now. Added the AIO camera with a rubber band and some double sided foam tape. Unfortunately, the quad is drifting to one side. I've tried setting the endpoints and center/trims on the TX and Betaflight, recalibrated the accelerometer, and confirmed proper prop rotation with no luck. I will have to do some research to figure out to fix this drift. One thing that might help is to use an FC adapter that is a bit more rigid.

2/21/2018: Turns out that the USB cable I use ends up jutting up against a prop and lifts the FC ever so slightly. This mucks up the accelerometer calibration. I've cut down the USB cable to try to minimize this contact and it flies a lot better after calibration (but it still drifts!). I've obtained a right angle micro USB adapter to try. I will also replace the TPE FC adapter with an ABS adapter to make the whole platform a lot more rigid as well.

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