After a long break moving to another city, I restarted my efforts on the quadcopter build. This time adding the motors and finalising the construction to the point of a maiden flight. Some changes to the previous thought process were incorporated: channelling the high current ESC wires through the aluminium tubes. The latter meant disassembling the whole quadcopter.

The motors are 800kV tiger motors which will each, in turn, need to drive a 10×4.5inch prop. The motors can be seen mounted on the edges of the quadcopter with their cabling running through the aluminium tube into the centre plate cavity. Next, the power distribution board was fastened on top of the centre plate with the help of plastic screws. This allowed the ESC’s to be installed connecting all four motors allowing some initial testing. To test the motors, the battery and PWM lines were connected to the distribution board and receiver module respectively. After confirming all four motors are spinning their directions could be set as illustrated in the APM wiki. The connections for the power distribution board can be seen below. The ESC PWM wires will need to be shortened, in the current configuration they will cause horrific RF pickup loops.

ESC’s and PDB mounted

With power and PWM connections to the motors now established the remaining electronics can be added to the build. The APM, telemetry radio and receiver are all now mounted on a platform and connected. This platform is part of the frame and will fit right above the distribution board. The electronics platform can be seen below.

Assembled electronics platform

After the electronics platform has been fitted, the shell containing the GPS and the landing gear was attached. Before mounting the props the ESC’s needed to be calibrated, which on stock settings were remarkably different from one another. Due to some physical restrictions, the quad is currently configured in a plus orientation which might be changed in the future. The quadcopter with its props can be seen below next to its 9x FrSky remote.

Full Multicopter Build