First of all, I started with polishing the carbon frame. It is not necessary, but will definitely help you in certain situations. No problems anymore with damaged cables, shrink tubes and it simply feels better when touching.
Next step was to remove the original shrink tube from the ESC and unsolder the wires. If you are not experienced with soldering and you probably don’t have a good soldering iron with a big solder tip, I don’t recommend doing that. Instead you can solder the cutted Motor and ESC wires together.
The advantage of direct soldering is a better and bigger connection area and one solder connection less which can fail. On top it also looks cleaner.
Step 2: Cutting the motor wires
To start with, mount the standoffs for PDB and FC on the frame and put the PDB on it. Then I mounted the motors on the frame – you don’t have to fully tighten the screws, it is enough when the motor is not moving anymore. Then cut the motor wires to the correct length.
Solder the motor wires to the ESC pads and check the necessary length of the ESC to PDB cables. The length of the XT60 connector was checked by mounting the top plate on the frame.
Note: Don’t forget to put shrink tube on the ESCs before soldering the power cables and where to mount the CW and CCW motors. In my case black cap is CCW and silver cap CW.
Step 3: Connecting the FC
The SPRacing F3 has the USB connector on a bad position. It is on the opposite side of the motor connectors, in flying direction: backside. For a small copter you always want to have the USB sideways to have easy access. In this case it means that the ESC connectors would go to the left or right side out of the quad – really bad situation.
So I decided to solder the ESC signal wires directly to the FC. It saves space and I am able to rotate the flight controller 90° clockwise. The FrSky receiver is using SBUS, also directly soldered to UART3 pin headers.
In the beginning, I planned to use UART2 for OSD. That’s why I used soft serial for telemetry. I choose soft serial port 2, because this one has small solder pads on the back of the FC (yellow cable). The LED bar is also using a small solder pad on the back (grey cable).
As you can see, I tried to avoid using the JST connectors whenever possible.
Step 4: Connecting the FPV Equipment
During the build I realized that the original planned Sony CCD Cam was simply too big for the frame. That is why I switched to another cam – the HS1177. This one fits pretty well between the original frame side plates.
The video transmitter (VTX) was mounted upside down on the upper frame plate to have some air flow on the cooling area of the VTX. Otherwise it is possible with these small transmitters that they overhead and shut down in really warm summer days. Note: I didn’t use video pads on the PDB and soldered the cables directly together.
When this step is finished, put everything back together and be happy about your almost finished quad. Only thing to do is mounting the antennas and you’re done with the build.
Challenges which occurred during the build process:
Because of the limited space I decided to not use the OSD. The only space left was in the front area below the cam. I left it out to be able to rotate the cam in a wider range.
Tools used for the build
A lot of screwdrivers and universal bit sets
Bosch IXO V
Weller WD1 Soldering Station
Tongs for all the cables
Files to deburr the frame parts
I want to say thank you to Christian Stock, the author of this article, for his time and effort to write it!
Lisam LS-210 Build Log
Main components:
Step 1: Preparing all components
First of all, I started with polishing the carbon frame. It is not necessary, but will definitely help you in certain situations. No problems anymore with damaged cables, shrink tubes and it simply feels better when touching.
Next step was to remove the original shrink tube from the ESC and unsolder the wires. If you are not experienced with soldering and you probably don’t have a good soldering iron with a big solder tip, I don’t recommend doing that. Instead you can solder the cutted Motor and ESC wires together.
The advantage of direct soldering is a better and bigger connection area and one solder connection less which can fail. On top it also looks cleaner.
Step 2: Cutting the motor wires
To start with, mount the standoffs for PDB and FC on the frame and put the PDB on it. Then I mounted the motors on the frame – you don’t have to fully tighten the screws, it is enough when the motor is not moving anymore. Then cut the motor wires to the correct length.
Solder the motor wires to the ESC pads and check the necessary length of the ESC to PDB cables. The length of the XT60 connector was checked by mounting the top plate on the frame.
Note: Don’t forget to put shrink tube on the ESCs before soldering the power cables and where to mount the CW and CCW motors. In my case black cap is CCW and silver cap CW.
Step 3: Connecting the FC
The SPRacing F3 has the USB connector on a bad position. It is on the opposite side of the motor connectors, in flying direction: backside. For a small copter you always want to have the USB sideways to have easy access. In this case it means that the ESC connectors would go to the left or right side out of the quad – really bad situation.
So I decided to solder the ESC signal wires directly to the FC. It saves space and I am able to rotate the flight controller 90° clockwise. The FrSky receiver is using SBUS, also directly soldered to UART3 pin headers.
In the beginning, I planned to use UART2 for OSD. That’s why I used soft serial for telemetry. I choose soft serial port 2, because this one has small solder pads on the back of the FC (yellow cable). The LED bar is also using a small solder pad on the back (grey cable).
As you can see, I tried to avoid using the JST connectors whenever possible.
Step 4: Connecting the FPV Equipment
During the build I realized that the original planned Sony CCD Cam was simply too big for the frame. That is why I switched to another cam – the HS1177. This one fits pretty well between the original frame side plates.
The video transmitter (VTX) was mounted upside down on the upper frame plate to have some air flow on the cooling area of the VTX. Otherwise it is possible with these small transmitters that they overhead and shut down in really warm summer days. Note: I didn’t use video pads on the PDB and soldered the cables directly together.
When this step is finished, put everything back together and be happy about your almost finished quad. Only thing to do is mounting the antennas and you’re done with the build.
Challenges which occurred during the build process:
Because of the limited space I decided to not use the OSD. The only space left was in the front area below the cam. I left it out to be able to rotate the cam in a wider range.
Tools used for the build
A lot of screwdrivers and universal bit sets
Bosch IXO V
Weller WD1 Soldering Station
Tongs for all the cables
Files to deburr the frame parts
I want to say thank you to Christian Stock, the author of this article, for his time and effort to write it!
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