2022 - 5" Freestyle FPV Drone Build

this is the drone that i use in most of my freestyle fpv videos and in this video i'm going to show you step by step how you can build one yourself the total cost to build this drone is about 300 this is my 2022 6s 5 inch freestyle fpv build guide [Music] so let's take a look at all the parts that i'm using for this build the frame the frame i'm using is the tbs source 1 v3 5 inch frame this frame is probably one of the most widely used frames out there it's thick it's durable and there are tons of 3d printable parts for this frame motors these are xylo stealth motors and they are awesome for the price i think these run about 12 or 13 dollars a piece so you're looking at 50 for an entire set these motors are let's open that so i'm using the 2206 1700 kv version but you can also get these in 2600 kv they also make a smaller version that i believe are 1408 that you can get in 2400kv and 3600kv those ones you could use on a cinewoop these ones are for something like a five inch drone or maybe a long range drone for the flight controller and esc i'm using a mamba basic f405 mk2 50 amp 4 to 6s stack so this has the flight controller one board and then the esc on a board underneath it this is kind of my go-to stack for most of my five inch drones and i've never had a problem with any of them and they just run great vtx like i mentioned this is a digital build so i'm using a cadx polar vista kit this has the vtx camera and antenna all in one ready to go so what receiver you use will depend on what controller you're using and what protocol you're using and just kind of depend on what other equipment you have beta fpv sent me this elrs receiver along with this elrs micro tx module so i'll be installing this on the drone and using this on my controller this is the 900 mhz version but they also make a 868 mhz and a 2.4 gigahertz version you can use pretty much any receiver for this build i'll just be installing this so prop wise for this drone you can kind of get whatever five inch prop you like my go-to is pb j fx 5-inch props i love how these props fly but i'm also going to be testing out these lumineer butter cutters i got a set of these for free so i'm just going to be testing these out on this drone but typically on this drone i would run these so let's get right into it to start build your frame [Applause] all right so we've got our frame assembled um each arm is held in with two screws these inner screws i didn't put in because these are actually the 30 by 30 holes so these are the screws that hold the flight controller so i didn't put those in yet because these the ones that are included in the frame aren't actually long enough to hold the stack that i have so the stack should come with longer screws and then those screws i'm actually going to put in the bottom here so actually let's do that now so here's the esc and the flight controller should be right with it so you got the esc in this one and the flight controller in this one so i'm just going to put those aside for now and get those four screws that are going to go into the frame out of the bag yep so they give you five of them but these are significantly longer than the ones that are included with the frame so definitely use the ones that come with your flight controller as opposed to these ones and those are literally just this whole this hole this hole and this hole here's the frame and as you can see these screws are a lot longer we're going to be able to mount our flight controller and esc stack right to that next let's get our motors mounted on here all right so we got our motors all mounted i'm just gonna take these wires and kind of push them underneath the drone just to keep them out of the way for now all right so now let's focus on mounting our esc so the esc is what goes on the bottom of the stack the esc looks like this so they include a little package of dampeners and i'm going to show you a little trick to getting those dampeners in i'm sure a lot of you already know it because it was in my 150 build video but it's a useful little trick they include a little package of dampeners as you can see they are actually color coded so the blue ones are softer and then the purple or violet ones are harder so here's a little trick on how to get these dampeners in easier get some dental floss doesn't really matter what type to get these in easier take the dental floss put it through the hole put the rubber grommet in like that and then just pull the floss through and it's gonna pull the grommet with it done so i'm going to do that with all four and then we'll move on to mounting this and getting the motors soldered on all right so here's our esc ready to go on this literally just slides right on over those bolts right like that now let's get our motors mounted up to the esc all right so you have four motors you have motor one two three and four and then you have on the esc you have four esc's you have esc one two three and four for each esc you have three pads so these three pads will go to the three wires on this motor same thing on this esc same thing on this one and same thing on this one so i'm going to show you on motor 4 just how i connect this to the esc so typically what i do is i'll just take the wires pinch them up against the frame because that's how i'm going to have them run when it gets time to connect them to the esc there's a couple ways that you can do this you can have it just go straight to the esc give yourself a little bit of slack this is how i'm going to connect it in this video you could also have the wires go underneath the flight controller and then connect to the esc right like that that keeps it a little cleaner for the sake of this video like i said i'm just gonna have it go right like that and then i'm gonna have a zip tie that kind of holds these in place so run it so you have a little bit of slack so right like that i'm comfortable with that and then what you want to do is just kind of mark where those are and now you want to just cut the wires there so you know you have enough slack to connect it to the esc so now take the wires and just kind of splice it so you have a little bit of wire exposed like that all right so now with the ends of the wire exposed we can pre-tin these wires and pre-tinning just basically you put a little bit of solder on here a little bit of solder on the board and it just makes it easier to connect it so before we do any soldering you don't have to do this but it makes it a little bit easier if you take a little bit of flux or a flux pen you can actually that's literally all you have to do and i'll do it to this side too because i'm here and you know what while i'm here letting my soldering iron heat up i'm going to put some on the battery leads as well just makes it easier to connect all right so i'm just going to take my soldering iron and i'm using a thicker tip you can see that i'm going to use a thicker tip because these pads are a little thicker but basically all you got to do is just enough to heat up the pad and then let the solder kind of flow onto it and then lift up let's now do the same thing on this one again just kind of let the pad heat up feed your solder into it there you go so i'm just going to do that all the way around i'm not going to do it through the battery pads yet but i'm going to do it to these four and then these six on top so now what we can do is we can put a little bit of solder on our motor wires and then we'll get it all hooked up to the esc so let the soldering iron kind of heat up the wire and then feed the solder into the wire do the same on this one now we're ready to hook our motor up to the esc so since both are pre-tinned you're not going to have to add any solder you can just kind of push it right into the esc pad and it should hold it there we go there's one two and three so now we have that motor hooked up i can take a zip tie and since we have a little extra slack i can secure these right like that and we can keep it nice and clean so that's how you hook up a motor i'm going to do that to the remaining four motors and then we'll continue all right there we go got all the motors all soldered up i put a couple zip ties just to hold the wires down for now but yeah looking pretty clean i think next what we should do is probably just get this cable hooked up just so i don't forget and then we'll also get the xt60 or the power lead hooked up to this right down here what i like to do is take the capacitor cut it down so that it sits flush with these little pegs and then you can solder it right to that and then you just have the capacitor right on the xt60 it frees up space in here and it just keeps it a little cleaner so once it's on here you can put some heat shrink around it so that's what i'm gonna do there we go now we're not gonna have to worry about the capacitor going on the board taking up some extra space and we can just connect this to the board and it'll be nice and clean so let's get these power leads uh ready to go so all i'm gonna do for that is just get some solder on here and i'm actually going to remove these standoffs to make it a little easier so basically same thing we did with the motors just put the soldering iron let the soldering iron heat up the pad and then feed the solder into the pad and let that kind of spread around like that i'll do the same on this one i'm not going to have these be flat because i'm going to have a cadx vista sitting back here and i don't want them completely straight up i'm probably going to just have them come at maybe like a 35 40 degree angle like this so i'm going to start with the positive there we go so there's the positive now let's do the negative we're going to do the same angle it's probably going to be a little easier now that that one's on there there we go put these stand ups back on before i forget so now let's focus on the flight controller the esc is all set this is everything we have to do with this next we have to get this plugged in but before we do that let's get some grommets installed on this so that we can get it mounted right on top of the esc so i'm going to use these thinner blue ones right here and i'm going to put them in the same way that i did these ones using the floss trick all right so these screws aren't long enough to hold the flight controller like i thought i put the other grommets on here and the grommets are pushing it up just high enough so that this can't go on to those screws so i have a couple of these little standoff kind of things so i'm just going to screw these on here and then we'll be able to put the flight controller right on that as you can see there's a little arrow right there that's pointing towards the front of the drone there's also no other way that you could put this on because this ribbon cable has to connect to that right there so actually i'm going to do that first so it goes right like that make sure it's pushed all the way down that looks good so now we can take our flight controller and put it on top of the esc right like that now we can get to soldering in our cadx vista and our receiver camera is going to go right up here i might try and fish this wire underneath the flight controller um and then the cadx vista is just going to sit right back there let's solder on some wires to this so that we can hook it up to our flight controller the cadx vista comes with a couple wires you can get flight controllers that actually have this pin ready to go this one so those are screws for the camera so we'll use those in a minute but you can get a flight controller that actually has this plug on it ready to go so then when you have this soldered to this end you can just plug it right in and then your vtx is ready to go but we don't have that so i'm going to snip the end off of here and since i'm not using the receiver that's built into this i'm going to just have these four wires right here so these other two are basically just for the receiver if you were using that function but since i'm not going to cut those off and i'm going to take this plug off and then we're just going to get these wires soldered to the catox vista and then we'll worry about getting them hooked up to the flight controller on the vista we have uh six pads here we're gonna only be soldering to four of them these two on this end are for the receiver and like i said we're not using the receiver so i'm just gonna focus on these four right here we have voltage ground rx and tx i'm going to use red and black for voltage and ground so i'll put those aside and then i'm just going to get these white and yellow wires soldered up to this pad and this pad and i'm going to basically just do the same thing that i did on the esc and just pre-tin the pad just makes it easier to work with i didn't add any flux to this so now i'm going to take the yellow wire i'm going to make that the tx wire like that white wire rx ground right next to that and voltage all right so to power the category vista you can't use a 5 volt source i think it's 7 to 24 volts or something um i found a 9 volt pad right here so i'm just going to power it off of the 9 volt and then right next to that is a ground so there's a 9 volt here and then a ground right next to it and then i'm going to pull tx6 and rx6 right down here i'm going to put a little bit of flux on there pretend the pad the 9 volt there's the ground and now we'll do tx and rx splice these wires so that they are easier to solder on so i'm going to actually separate the ground and power from the tx and rx just because they are on the other side of the board so i'll have these wound up together and then i'll have these wound up together i'll just keep it nice and clean all right so i'll get the nine volt soldered up first and then we'll do the ground so now let's do rx and tx and when you're doing the rx and tx you actually want the rx on the vista to go to tx on the flight controller and tx on the vista to go to rx on the flight controller so since that's the case we have yellow going to tx so the yellow wire is going to go to the rx pad and then white is hooked up to rx so white is going to go to the tx i like that boom this is hooked up so now let's secure it to the drone all right so with the cadx vista all hooked up now it's time to just secure this to the frame we'll get the camera mounted up and [Music] go from there so i'm going to run the camera wire underneath the flight controller if you're doing this just make sure that it's not uh pinched at all so just kind of like see if it's got some wiggle room that does so nice and now this is gonna sit right like that move the camera up here so i have these screws right here i'm going to push these through the bottom of the frame through the caddux vista and that's what's going to hold that in place i'm going to find some little rubber grommets just to space the caddis vista off of the frame and then i'll push those through like that and that's actually going to help hold the screw in place while i get the other ones done so i'm going to do that to all of them there we go so i got all those screws in so i'm going to go get some little bolts to hold that on so the vista is not bouncing around now let's mount the camera when you're looking at a bracket like this this part goes to the back so all of those like half circle kind of things you want those towards the back of the drone that's going to make it so that you can tilt the camera up there we go now you can just push this down in place make sure you're not pinching any wires awesome so these camera mounts make it so that you can move the camera up so if you have the camera too far back and you end up seeing these standoffs in view you can actually move it forward so take this screw out and the screw and move it to these two holes and then you won't get that stuff in view i'm gonna put these two standoffs back in before i forget make sure you secure the flight controller down ours came with these clear little hex screws or hex bolts whatever dude just make sure that that's on there holding it down so now it's time to solder on your receiver again this is going to vary depending on what kind of receiver you're using i'm using this beta fpv elrs receiver and this is going to hook up the exact same way that a tbs crossfire receiver would hook up so for this receiver we need a 5 volt ground tx and rx pad so i'm going to use the pads that are right next to the cadx vista these four right here we have ground 5 volt tx and rx so the receiver is going to be on uart3 tx3 and rx3 are you r3 so i'm going to put a little bit of flux on there get these pre-tinned and then i'm going to get these pre-tend i'm going to hook it up instead of this antenna i'm going to use this tbs immortal t antenna this is going to just let it so that i can at least either mount it on an arm or 3d print something to put it in the back here but this is the antenna that i'm going to be using so i'm going to take some heat shrink this is included with the receiver put it around here put the antenna on and just heat that up so i just printed a couple parts you don't need to print these this just makes it a little easier when installing everything this is going to hold the caddux vista antenna and then these two are going to hold the immortal t antenna over here so the polar vista comes with this antenna there's not many mounts out there for this antenna there's a lot more mounts for this antenna so i'm going to use this one this is the older style antenna i don't think it makes a difference with the polar vista versus a regular vista which antenna you use so i'm going to use this one put this through first and then just hold it nice and place to install the antenna on a vista all you got to do is take off this screw right here and when you take that off you don't have to technically take it off completely i think it's easier to take it off completely and then this little cover right here just kind of slides out of the way and you can do this without removing that screw or you can take the screw out i take it out because i think it's a lot easier take that off take your antenna and plug it in i'm gonna put this little tiny cover back on cool there we go i'll run the antenna back here there you go now all i'm basically going to do i'm not going to do this on camera is just kind of tidy up these wires make sure that the antenna wire is nice and secure in here same with the uh receiver and just make sure that that's nice and secure down here i may end up running this wire underneath the flight controller just to keep it cleaner and we'll get it all back together alright so i ended up running the xt60 between these two antennas that should be enough room to connect the battery and i also ran the antenna wire up above the vista and then underneath the flight controller and i have the receiver sitting right there so this is pretty damn clean i am very happy with how this turned out let's throw the cover on here we'll do some basic beta flight tuning and we'll go take this thing for a test flight all right so with the props off let's plug this into betaflight [Music] all right it's kind of setting itself up looks good now just kind of move it around and make sure that everything is in the right direction this is looking perfect i like doing this on all my quads even though it looks pretty level on the computer i'm just going to click calibrate accelerometer and it's just going to sit flat i know that the table that i'm on is completely flat so i just like having to calibrate it to that first thing we're going to do is go into ports and this is where we set up our cadx vista and our receiver so my receiver i used on uart3 they have it on uart1 so i'm going to change that to ur3 and then since i'm using the dji unit uh we're going to do a configuration msp on uart 6. if you're doing an analog build you would want to come over here and you would select the protocol that you're using sounds good save and reboot [Music] now come under configuration this is where you can name it name your drone you can rotate the board if you installed it sideways or upside down or something all of these look good we're going to test the motor direction in a minute pay attention to which way it says the motors are spinning so you're going to want motor one that's this one spinning clockwise motors one and four will always spin the same direction and then motors three and two will also always spin the same direction opposite of one and four so these all look good and i don't have to fix the orientation of the board or anything if you did you would do that right in this board and sensor alignment area just leave all this stuff alone craft name you can name your drone if you want and receiver so this is where we configure what kind of receiver we used so since i used an ers receiver this runs on the crossfire protocol so i'm going to come in here make sure that serial based receiver is selected and then over here change this from sbus to crossfire and all this other stuff looks pretty good make sure you have osd on so that you can see on screen display text and led strip if you're using any leds and this all looks pretty good and then i usually just keep all of these on this just makes it so that when you're clicking the beeper function on your controller it beeps through the motors now let's go to the motors tab this is where we can check which direction the motors are spinning so basically we just double check our work make sure that all the wires are soldered up to the esc correctly and if they're not we can go into another program which is bl heli s or ble32 and we can reverse the direction of the esc so to do this you need a battery plugged in cool now we can do is we can go down here check this and you just want to make sure that the motors are it up and what i usually do is i will put a prop on here and i'll just kind of rest it on there like that and then now we can see which way the motor is spinning without it actually potentially taking off so we can see that that motor is spinning counterclockwise so this one's correct this one we'll do the same thing that looks right test motor four spin in the same direction as motor one so that's right and then this one should spin counterclockwise motor perfect all right so the motors are clearly all hooked up right so we can unplug our battery that's really the only thing you need your battery plugged in for unless your receiver requires battery so unplug it just to prevent the vtx from overheating and we'll move on osd this is where you configure everything that you want in your goggles i'm not going to worry about this right now video transmitter we don't have to worry about because we're using digital and the rest of this you don't really have to worry about either so we don't have to worry about any of this this is all pretty much all set up so now i'm going to hop over to elrs and get the receiver in here updated and that's all through the computer i'm not going to show this because this will vary but depending on what receiver you have all right so i have the receiver all set up so it should be bound to my controller i'm going to plug in the drone to betaflight and i have my controller on and i'm going to plug a battery into the drone now if i go over to the receiver tab i should see stick movement on here when i move the sticks around just make sure that everything looks right so when you yaw it jaws and when you give it throttle it throttles and so on make sure all the switches work you know all that stuff so once you see that it works on here go to the modes tab and we're going to add range on arm this is where we set up all the switches on the controller with the drone so arm keep this on auto and now on your controller just switch the switch that you want to be the arm switch you'll see the little yellow tab move and just move this down here and now when it's in that position it's going to be armed and now it's disarmed so i'm going to go through and just do that to all the different modes that i want on this drone and once you're done just hit save and you can go to the top hit hide unused modes and that'll just declutter all of this and you can see all the different modes that you have on flick all the switches make sure it lines up with what you want the drone to do looks good just hit save and we're all set with betaflight all right last thing you need to do plug a battery in plug your cadx vista into your computer and launch dji assistant 2. that's how you can activate the unit so you can pair it with your goggles when you need to pair with your goggles just plug a battery in make sure it has power and you click this button once and then you click the little red button on your goggles once they'll start beeping and then it should just automatically link and you'll have video once you're at that point you'll be able to take it outside take it for a flight [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] so there you have it like i said this is the drone that i use for any of the freestyle footage that you guys see i still have to adjust the tune on it what you guys saw was basically just the stock tune that came on this mamba flight controller below are all the links to all the parts that i used for this build as well as some alternative analog parts if you want to build an analog version if you enjoyed this video make sure you subscribe to the channel i have more drone build videos coming out soon i have a cinema video that i'm working on right now and i think you guys are really gonna like the flight footage that i get for that one i've also started doing a lot of giveaways so make sure you subscribe so you don't miss those make sure you like the video and if you have any questions leave it down in the comments section you

Channel: TRONCAT FPV

Views: 735,625

Keywords: cinematic fpv, drone, racing drone build, racing drone, custom drone, reelsteady, cinematic gopro footage, fpv drone, Cinewhoop, drone build, flight controller, dji fpv, digital drone, fpv drone freestyle, fpv drones

Id: Z5t0M2sluLA

Length: 38min 34sec (2314 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 12 2022