Not a Quad:The FT Nutball is finished!

The FT Nutball is finished. Maiden flight tomorrow.

Not a Quad - New Battery Charger

While doing some research to determine what type of power supply I needed to provide voltage for the battery charger I discovered that the charger I had purchased was not suitable to charge the 500mAh 2S battery.

The issue was that the Hobbyking Balance Charger is unable to change the charge rate from the 1Ah and would therefore try to charge the 500mAh battery too quickly. This can be dangerous and can lead to LIPO batteries exploding.

To ensure I could safely charge the 500mAh battery I purchased a Turnigy Accucell-6 charger from Hobbyking. This has allowed me to safely charge the smaller battery at 100mAh.

Not a Quad - Nutball Parts List

 Some of the parts for the Nutball have arrived from Hobbyking and I thought I would document them here to show everyone what is required to complete the plane.

Parts for the FT Nutball

The motor is a hexTronic 24g Brushless rated at 1300kv. It comes with a prop-saver and mount.

The speed control is an 18A Turnigy Basic.

 

The battery is a Zippy Flightmax 500mah 2S. I also purchased a HobbyKing Balance charger.

The servos are HXT900 9g Micro Servos

The props are 8045R Slow Fly Electrics

Along with these parts I also purchased some control-rods, clevis's and wheels.

Still to be purchased are the bullet connectors, control horns and firewall.

The next step in the process is to solder bullet connectors to the motor and ESC wiring.

Once this is completed I will wait until my kids are available to help me do the final assembly.

Not a Quad - Flitetest Nutball Scratchbuild

The quad has taken a back seat at the moment. Instead I have started to build a scratch-build RC plane to assist me to learn to fly.

I am a huge fan of the Flitetest guys and am going to start by building one of their Swappable Nutball scratchbuilds. I looked at buying the laser-cut kit but with postage it was going to cost me double the cost of the kit in postage to ship to Australia.

The plane is built from 5mm Foam Board. It is easy to work with and can be cut with a hobby knife.

First step was to print out and tape all the pages together to get a full size plan of what needed to be cut out of the board. Flitetest also supply a printable A1 version which you can get a printshop to print.

Using a sharp hobby knife, I cut each of the pieces out of the foam board. This plane only has three main pieces (fuselage, wing and stabilizer). Once the pieces have been cut, the next step was to make each of the control surfaces and form the dihedral in the wing. This was very simple following along with the build video created by the Flitetest team.

Once the wing was built, I formed up the basic power pod unit to test it fit into the slots in the wing. As my foam is 5mm and the plans are based on 4mm foam there was some slight adjustments to make everything fit.

Thats it for today. I need to wait for my electronics to be delivered to fit out the power pod and complete all the attachments for the wing to the power pod.

Thanks to the crew at Flitetest for a easy and cheap way to enter the RC flying hobby.

 

Quadracopter Introduction

Welcome to my Quadcopter Build blog.

My ultimate goal is to build a quadcopter that will allow aerial photography, UAV and FPV flight.

To ease the learning curve, I will build this in stages. This will allow me to learn more about the various systems and componentry without spending large amounts of money initially.

The plan is to start small and work my way up.

1. Simple quadcopter using frame and control board from HobbyKing.
2. Upgrade Quad 1. to include camera.
3. Larger frame using aluminium arms and platforms using the same electronics fromm Hobbyking.
4. Upgrade the larger frame using ArduCopter Board from DIYDrones.

I will be documenting my progress using this blog and including videos when appropriate to demonstrate the build.