Building a Quadcopter p.3 - Assembly

Key Takeaways

all right so real briefly I'm going to cover some of the things that might not be so obvious in the video so when you're putting together your quad depending on the frame that you have I mean some things are going to be different but at the end of the day everything pretty much boils down to these major components and I'm going to show you how these major components are supposed to all be kind of connected to each other so um first of all what powers the entire quadcopter is your LiPo battery and you'll connect your lipo battery this is the positive lead and a negative lead and depending on you know you might actually I've I've got on this new quadcopter I've got a I suppose an upgraded version of a flight controller and an upgraded version of a power distribution board it just makes it easier to use but at the end of the day they're both identical because the only things you're really caring about here in connections are these four pins where you've got three pins each that's where your receiver for your transmitter plugs in and you'll see they're marked Aon elevator throttle Rudder and then over here you've got your motor plugs this is for motor 1 2 3 and four so you can see that this goes all the way up to six you just will leave these two empty so to power the entire quad you've got your battery which plugs directly into the distribution board and some distribution boards will come with a battery plug already kind of soldered to two wires some will not so if you don't have that you'll need some 12 gauge wire okay and you'll cut the wire to be I don't know maybe six six inches or so you might trim it or make make it longer it doesn't really matter but you'll just kind of one thing you have to do you know every frame is a little different and the the way you're going to situate that frame is a little different for example if you're not putting on a Raspberry Pi and a Grove pie you've got a lot more space to put things where you want than I did on my quad in this video regardless you got let's say two you got a black and red 12 gauge wire and then you can buy these little xt60 uh plugs you would solder that in put some shrink wrap on it uh heat that up and now you've got your plug that connects in okay so the battery comes into here from there what happens is power comes out from the distribution board and heads to your esc's okay so this is my ESC basically the ESC plugs in uh to the various like here and here I say plug but actually what what I mean is you have to solder it on okay so if you have the power distribution board that I had they had little Bol connectors here so you would actually take this male connector and solder it to each one and then you just have to plug them in and so that's why I bought it it was it was just a lot easier to do because you'll notice the holes here are pretty large and to solder these little tiny wires in those large holes is actually kind of difficult so that's why I like that other board but it really doesn't matter um and especially like with soldering here to solder a 12 gauge wire in there it's super easy it just requires a lot of solder we'll talk about uh how to solder here in a moment but first I just want to show you how everything connects so let me move this over to get as much space as I can so power comes out through your distribution board to the ESC and then the ESC here this is your like your motor cable Brown is basically ground so then your motor cable let's say this is for motor number one will plug in your control board so for example this is my control board here so I plugged into motor number one might be kind of hard to see but that's those three pins where you got six rows of three pins it's plugged in to motor number one now so when that's plugged in let me move this over now you have the ESC and that's this is also how the board gets its power the power is literally coming from the motorboard and so the now the KK board when you plug in will have power then you have these three black wires coming out of your ESC this confused the heck out of me because you've got three black wires coming out of your ESC you got three black wires on your motor this is just really irritating because you're probably wondering uh how do I connect these freaking things well from what I can find you actually just kind of connect them randomly and um I guess the ESC or the motor just figures it out I don't know what kind of Wizardry they're doing in there but bottom line you're not going to break anything by uh you just randomly connect these so what you're going to do and the what's important is you randomly connect them but but you might find that the motor's spinning in the in the incorrect Direction so in order to fix that if it's not spinning in the direction you want you just flip any two of the wires and that will reverse the motor so again that's like super crazy sounding to me but that just that's the way it is like that is the recommendation and everything so anyway um yeah so that was really hard whenever I was first getting started so next is these bullet adapters how do we use them how do we solder them and all that um basically uh you take if you look at the adapter might be kind of hard to see on the video but yeah so what you see that little hole there this is just how I do it I don't know if this is the proper way but anyway I'll take the soldering iron tip and I push put the tip in that through that hole basically just the tip anyway uh and then you've got I'm so mature you've got uh the wire so you would like Drop in that wire through the through the actual like larger ho there drop in that wire and then you've got you put the tip in there and you warm up basically you're heating everything and then I take the solder and I feed in the solder at the same place where I'm feeding in The Wire so this you know it might not be totally ideal because here's the thing with um with soldering is generally what you want to do is rather than um you don't you don't he you know you don't touch the the solder with the iron instead what you're trying to do is you're trying to touch the metal that you're the metal parts that you're trying to connect and you want to heat up those metal parts so that when you touch the solder to those metal Parts not the iron that melts the solder and that's how you're going to get a really nice connection with these bullet adapters um basically my way around that because it's just so hard everything's so stuffed in there it's almost impossible not to be touching the wire and the solder basically with the iron um I usually just poke the soldering iron in there and I leave it there for maybe 10 seconds and then I feed in the solder and that's that's been fine I haven't had any bad connections yet so um just keep that in mind so um so you'll solder basically this one on here and then coming over to your motor you would solder the male end of the bullet adapter to this side and then when you're all done you've got both of these you would just simply connect them okay and for now I would just leave them bare and I I used um painters tape just to make sure they don't touch each other I'm not 100% certain that it would be a problem if they touched each other simply because of the circuitry in there but I didn't want to find out because eses and and the motors are kind of expensive someone can tell me for sure if they know if if it wouldn't really matter if these two touched each other but I do know if it touched your frame you might be in trouble so um so anyway I just kind of wrapped him in a little bit of pain your tape just to make sure they weren't going to touch anything and then once I was certain that the uh order was correct I used electrical tape taped each one individually and then I taped them around the arm but you'll see that in the video um and then finally the real way that typically you're going to solder is going to be the following so this is a pretty ugly board so let me flip it over this is the board I fried uh so uh basically to solder typically onto a circuit board you've got wires like this and the leads will stick up out through the holes and then you take solder you put the solder on one side you take your iron and you put it on the other side of the wire basically and you'll heat up the wire first and then you'll take the solder you'll touch it to the wire and then you just lift up that's how you do soldering um you can Gob it on there do crazy stuff and you'll probably be more than fine but that's generally the way that you do it you heat up with the iron first take the solder touch it not to the soldering iron but to the actual wire itself as soon as it starts kind of melting on you just lift it up and you'll have a pretty pretty darn good connection you just want to make sure everything's nice and hot and uh the adhesion should be pretty darn good if you do it that way um I do recommend there are a lot of really good videos out there on YouTube for soldering and stuff like that although most of them are on circuit boards where the holes are really small these holes are really large and it's hard to do it without just gobbing the crap out of it so um do what you will so anyways um that's how everything connects and um that should clear up up a few things other than this what you don't see in this little connection is the receiver that plugs into here and that receiver is just what sends signals everywhere uh while I have this this board out I will just say uh if you look on the these little screws right here these are for setting the gyro sensitivity on this board to set gyro sensitivity on the other board it's like a nice LCD screen but on this one you turn these little things with a tiny uh flathead screwdriver and it means nothing to you at the moment but soon when we're talking about calibrating the esc's the way that you do that is you set this yaw to zero which is you know all the way counterclockwise so keep that in mind if you have this board uh that's what you'll do otherwise uh we'll carry on with putting together the quad copter all right so this is just a super sped up version of me putting the quad together depending on your frame and where you're situating things you might be putting yours together totally different so for me a lot of time was spent figuring out where to stuff everything because I'm trying to put a Grove pie and a and a Raspberry Pi on here uh some things to pay attention to is motor orientation some quads are identical front to back other frames have like a specific front and back the one I'm working with has a specific front and back but my previous one didn't so once you've established that usually the way that it goes is the black you'll have two you'll have four total Motors two of them have black tips and then two of them will have silver tips and then the black ones generally have reversed uh threads and all that so um the the black Motors are the ones that spin clockwise and this is considered the actual reverse rotation so black Motors are for one and three motor one is at the top left three is at the bottom right two and four spin counterclockwise and they're located at the top right and bottom left so keep that in mind also remind you again carbon fiber conducts electricity it will cause a short circuit if you let your components directly sit on it or touch it or contact it uh it's the resistance is relatively minimal so the conductiv is pretty small but uh it will cause a short circuit over you know after a few minutes or so and that might be your quad might be in Flight you might not notice it's smoking until it's vastly too late so even just like a little bit of electrical tape to cover the electrical components will solve this problem uh finally last thing before you plug in your battery the first time check all of your leads make sure positive to positive negative to negative especially at the battery you're closer to the battery if you make this mistake and switch them around you will likely fry everything and you'll have to start all over so that kind of sucks just keep in mind though the connection from the ESC to the motor that's totally random don't worry about that one it might be really uncomfortable for you but uh that's just the way it is so that one you don't really have to pay attention to but be careful with the positive and negative leads going to the power distribution board and of course to the battery so anyways uh with that in mind uh hopefully you guys will get your quad together and we'll talk about calibrating the uh esc's as as well as the actual flight controller if you have any questions comments concerns whatever up to this point feel free to leave them below otherwise as always thanks for watching thanks for all this important subscriptions and until next time