How To Build a 7" Long Range FPV Drone

all right guys first fpv build of 2023. in this video I'm going to show you how to build and set up this seven inch long range fpv drone that's capable of almost 25 minute long flights has automatic return to home functions and can film stabilized 4K footage without the added weight of a GoPro [Music] all right let's quickly go over all the parts that I'm going to be using in this build first up the frame for this build I went with the HG lrc Recon 7 Pro frame I really wanted a seven inch frame that had arm brace reinforcement it also needed to fit the O3 air unit this Frame seemed perfect I'm a fan of hdlrc products so I figured I'd give this one a shot plus it comes with tons of TPU parts for antennas GPS GoPro Mount all that good stuff next up I already mentioned this O3 air unit this is what I'm going to be using for the fpv footage and the HD footage so I don't plan on mounting a GoPro to this build that's going to save us a nice chunk of weight giving us longer flight times since we're talking about the O3 air unit I'll show you guys the antennas I'm planning on using with this I don't plan on using the stock antenna these are hglrc's Hammer long range antennas the frame comes with TPU pieces that are actually meant for these antennas so it's going to fit that nicely next up the flight controller and the ESC I plan on using t-motor for both of them this is the velox F7 cine HD flight controller this flight controller won't require any soldering as far as the O3 air unit goes because it actually has a plug specifically meant for the O3 air unit this has dual becs a built-in barometer which is something I definitely wanted on a long range build like this and even though we're only using four Motors on this build this flight controller actually has eight motor outputs so if you wanted to use a fly controller for an octocopter or an eight motor drone you can use a slight controller on the ESC side of things we're also going with t motor and I'll be using their velox 50 amp 32-bit four on one ESC this is going to pair nicely with the flight controller both of these are rated for 6s and I do plan on using 6s batteries for this build speaking of 6s I'm going to be trying out a couple different lithium ion packs on this build but the one I'm most excited for is this upgrade energy dark lithium 5200 milliamp 6s pack I also have a 3000 milliamp lithium ion that I'll be trying out but I think that this one is going to be perfect for this build next up motors for Motors I'm going with t Motors velox 1500 KV Motors they sell these in 1300 1500 and 1900 KV for a build like this for a long range build I'd probably stick with 1300 or 1500 when I was gathering parts for this build the 1300 KV was out of stock so we went with 1500. for props I have two sets that I want to try out I've got a set of tri-blades and I've got a set of bi-blades both of these are HQ prop the tri-blades are seven by four and then the buy blades are seven by four point five at the end of the video I'll let you guys know which one I prefer better I'm anticipating that I like the bi blades a little bit more since they're typically more efficient with long range drones but we'll see for a long range drone like this I'm going with the best receiver I can get this is the crossfire diversity Nano RX with this I also have two antennas and these are the extended Crossfire Immortal T antenna V2s what kind of long range build would I be doing if I didn't include a GPS so in this build I'm going to be using this hdlrc M80 Pro this GPS is actually going to fit perfectly in the TPU pieces that are included with our frame in addition to the GPS I wanted to throw a beeper on this guy so just to be safe I picked up one of these this is the vi fly finder II this is a beeper that has its own Battery Source so in the event of a crash where your battery comes disconnected and you can't beep it and there's no GPS you can't find it anywhere this thing's going to continue to beep because it has its own built-in battery and last but not least here are a couple additional things that I picked up to help make the build nice and clean got some battery straps here from rdq these come with every order you get from them got some flywoo ND filters for the O3 air unit since that's going to be our primary HD video Source got some braided wire mesh for the motor wires this is going to help keep everything nice and organized on the arms and you guys are probably looking at this like what the hell is going on this is copper tape and this actually really helps get a solid satellite fix I'll go further into detail on this once we're installing the GPS but this is almost essential for any drone you have a GPS on all right let's put this drone together first thing you got to do put your frame together foreign hdlrc or Recon actually has a nice PDF on how this Frame goes together so I'll flash that on the screen now I'll leave a link to it down in the description you guys can follow that assemble this Frame and then we'll continue so here is the frame all together I haven't secured this top plate down yet just taking a look inside I've got the front TPU pieces on there for the camera this TPU piece and the rest of them we're probably gonna have to take off as we assemble the rest of the Drone but we've got the buzzer Mount up here and that also has an antenna mount on the side I'll go into that a little bit later we have the O3 mount back here the kit does come with other mounts for different vtx's but I'm using the O3 so I've got the O3 mount back here and then this is the TPU Mount that's going to hold all of our antennas so like I said I'm probably going to have to remove these as we build the Drone but this is good for now next on the list let's put our Motors on all right so I got all my Motors right here brushless motors it doesn't matter which arm they go on we can always change the direction of the motors in betaflight so when we're mounting the motor to this Frame since we're going to be using this brace we're actually going to have to get some additional screws since we don't have screws that are long enough that come with the motors or with the frame so the front the screws that come with the motors are long enough to go through just these arms but once you add this it makes it a little bit thicker and unfortunately these screws don't go through and don't reach the motor so instead of using these screws I have some M3 by 12. screws and I'll leave a link to a kit of these down in the description you can get these on Amazon but this is going to give us enough length to go through this as well as the actual arm so let's get the motors all mounted up I'll show you one and then the process is the same for all four so both of these arm braces are the exact same so it doesn't matter which one you use just make sure that these grooves line up with the holes obviously that's not right so if we rotate it this way that should line up that looks good so let's take some of our screws for the motors I'm going to put it through here and that's just enough to grab onto the motor so let's get that one on first foreign take another screw so running the wires along the arms let's do that for each arm all right so we got our Motors on I mainly used m 3 by 12 screws if you use M3 by 14 just make sure that the screw isn't going up into the motor otherwise you're going to have problems I will leave a link to some M3 by 12 screws for this build down in the description so let's put these on the wires just to kind of clean this up a little bit you should have plenty here to cover these I'm gonna have to go all the way down to the motor so I'm going to cut mine about right there and I'm just gonna make a couple that are about that long cool so now we've got our rear braided mesh wire covers and then we've got our front so these braided mesh things can come apart very easily so to prevent that from happening before anything happens to this end so right after you cut it take a lighter and just kind of melt the end together you really don't have to hold it there long and that should be good so now this isn't going to all fall apart so do that to all of these just to make sure that they kind of Stay Together take your wires I'm going to do it just on this motor here and just put your wires through it I like to have this all the way up against the motor or at least as far in as I can that's good so that's going to keep the wires nice and tidy so now let's do that all the way around just to kind of clean this up a little bit okay so we've got all these wires nice and organized next what I want to do is I'm going to put the ESC on here and we're going to get to soldering the motors to the ESC as well as the power cable so let's open this up stickers that is a nice looking ESC look at that so the ESC is typically going to sit in the Drone like this you've got Motors one two three and four it's labeled on the ESC but instead on this Frame since the power cable is actually going to be coming out the front they don't really have a way of getting the power cable out the rear since they have this cut out right here that's what we're going to use the power cable is going to be coming out through there what I'm going to do is instead of having the ESC oriented like this I'm actually going to rotate it like this now betaflight has made it pretty easy to rotate things and make sure that it's remapped so that motor 4 is motor 1 and motor 3 is motor 2 and so on and so forth I'll show you guys how to do that in a little bit but now we can just basically Mount our ESC right like this and we'll have our power cable right here that can just come right up and we'll also have room to put our capacitor on there since we have this nice big groove right here so this is how I'm going to mount the ESC with the frame we got some we got four of these longer gold M3 screws we're going to be using those before we do that we're going to put the rubber gravity on the ESC so t-motor included these little yellow grommets right here but instead of using those we're actually going to use the ones that are included with the frame just because it spaces it a little bit further away from the frame put the thicker side on the bottom because we're going to be trying to just space it away from the frame so right like that if you struggle with these you can always take some dental floss and you can put it through the top of the hole on the ESC so you'll take it kind of put it through here feed it through make a circle put this in through the circle and then just pull the dental floss and it'll pull this through with it I've done that on a couple builds and it definitely helps but these ones are actually going in pretty easily so we don't have to do that there we go so with those rubber grommets on we can now secure this to the frame we'll take these four gold screws that came with the frame we're going to feed these through the bottom we've got four holes that are cut out for the 30 by 30 mounting and now making sure that they don't fall out the bottom flip the drone over like that they'll kind of fall a little bit but it's still enough to get the ESC on there now take your ESC remember we're not mounting it like this we're going to be mounting it like that put it over the screws nice and now we can kind of just feed those through from underneath and there we go perfect now we've got our ESC mounted up all right so now it's time to solder our Motors to the ESC now looking at the ESC we have four Motors here each motor gets three pads so these three pads right here will go to motor three which is right here these three pads right here are going to go to motor four and those are right here so when you're soldering these wires to the pads it doesn't matter which order they go in you can have it be completely flat like that you can have you can twist the wires and then you know not really care which pad the wires go to because all that's going to do is change the direction of the motor and that's going to be something that we have to change in betaflight anyways all right so I'm going to show you guys how to do this with motor three this is motor 3 right here but the process is going to be the same for motor one two three and four so I'm going to measure out the motor wire right here I'm going to kind of go Wire by wire and just say okay this one is going to go to this pad right here this middle one is going to go to the second pad and then this one is going to go to this for the most pad right here and kind of just measure them accordingly so we'll take this this one is going to go right there so I'm going to say right where I'm going to cut this one right here perfect do the same thing for this one this one is going to go right about there make sure you give yourself a little bit of slack because if you don't have any slack then it's going to just be a pain to solder these on and then this one is going to go right here so I'm going to give myself some slack and cut that and just kind of splice these wires perfect before we do any soldering always a good idea to put some flux on these pads just makes it a lot easier all right so I'm going to put a little bit of solder on each of these wires don't need much cool and now what I'm going to do I'm actually going to go around the whole board I'll just show you guys this these three motors but just kind of put some solder on these motor pads so I would suggest soldering up the wire closest to you first just a little bit easier so we'll have this come back here kind of like that all right there's one two I'm just kind of stacking these wires on here you can have them go however you want perfect I like that I'm happy with that whatever dude looks good to me let's do that with each motor that is pretty clean I am very happy with how that came out so the capacitor that's included is this one right here and it actually fits right in between this carbon fiber plate right here so I'm going to be able to just put the the capacitor right in there and just kind of Bend these over and solder them on directly to the battery pads I'm going to put some flux on the ends of this capacitor that's what we're going to be soldering to this and I'm going to put some flux right on here whenever you're working with battery pads it's best to use a pretty thick tip that's the size of the tip that I'm using and it works really good for big pads like this that looks good I'm going to put some solder on these the positive and negative poles of this capacitor putting solder on the actual pull on the capacitor it makes this a lot easier I've noticed because these can be difficult to solder just a little bit you probably won't even see it that much so what I'm going to do to make this nice and flush in this hole against the ESC I'm going to just bend these poles over like that and now these can line up with the positive and negative so I'm going to do this initially right through here just to have a good idea of how it's going to be sitting and to keep it as flush as I can I'm actually going to trim these capacitor ends right here just to keep it nice and flush so I'm going to cut this down probably just to about there underneath the frame I'm gonna put some blue tack in that hole and that's going to hold the capacitor so that I can solder it a little easier to the ESC pads now I can push that down like that and now I can solder that down positive and negative cool that's good for now and when I lift this up should have the capacitor on there yeah so now we have the capacitor right there very cool so now we can get our battery lead hooked up they include a nice little xt60 with the ESC I'm going to trim this because it's going to be coming out right like that I'm just going to put this top cover on just to get some perspective of where the xt60 is going to be coming out so if I have this probably want it about here because it's going to be coming out basically at these standoffs so I can kind of eyeball that and be like I want the xt60 to come out about that much and I'll probably just cut it about there all right so trim these down we'll tin them Now red to Positive Black to negative so now we're pretty much all set with the ESC the last thing we really have to do is plug in the ribbon cable underneath there's a plug on this side closest to the O3 air unit TPU piece if you did put this on you're gonna have to take it off now in fact I'm actually going to just take off all of this TPU back here I guess when you're assembling the frame you don't have to put any of the TPU pieces on probably just be easiest to do that all right so now with all the TPU off we can plug in this ribbon cable this ribbon cable came with the ESC I think it came with the ESC or the flight control I'm pretty sure it came with the ESC but this plugs in right underneath here right like that make sure it's in all the way with that all set now I'm going to move over to the flight controller they include a lot of yellow grommets in the container for that but just to keep it consistent with the look of the one that's on the ESC I'm going to use the remaining four grommets that hdlrc included with the frame kit so I'm going to use these all right so now it's time to hook up our flight controller now I was initially thinking since we have the ESC rotated 180 degrees we would have to rotate the flight controller 180 degrees now when you're looking at the flight controller this Arrow should be pointing forward so we're going to want it facing in this Direction with these flight controllers since we have a little plug down here this is going to plug into one of these two ports up here so this flight controller has eight motor outputs this one right here is for Motors one through four and then this one is for Motors five through eight so we're going to want to plug it into this plug right here trunk cap from the future here instead of plugging the ESC into this port over here plug it into this one this one is for Motors one through four and this one is actually for Motors five through eight I got those two swapped so again plug it into this one not this one so this is the cable that we already attached plug in right like that now initially I thought we were going to just have to go like that but luckily there's enough slack on here to actually have it sit normally on this drone it initially pulls on the wire a little bit but then once you press it down you can tell that there is a little bit of slack in there so it's not completely strained let's start to get some stuff mounted to the Drone now that we have the flight controller on top it's kind of time to hook up the buzzer we'll do the VTX the camera the GPS and the receiver so let's start with the easiest thing and I think that's going to be the O3 air unit so I'm going to take the TPU piece right here and we can just kind of deal with this right now and then we'll hop over to the antennas and we can get the camera mounted and all that stuff so let's get the O3 air unit out of the box first thing I want to do is stickers off now since I have antennas that I'm going to use for this I'm not going to be using this single antenna on the back I'm going to take this back cover off so that we can just replace the antennas right off the bat that cover comes off take the antenna off and I'm going to grab the other antennas that I got one for each UFL connector cool so before we get these attached to that I'm going to take this rear TPU piece right here you want these things out and we're going to put these around the antennas first so there's like a little slit in these that makes it a little bit easier to do feed that wire right through there and then this fits right in like that cool so those only go down halfway into this TPU I think there's like a little Groove that it gets caught on but that looks good so now we can take these and we're going to feed them right through here like that and do the same with this one so now we got to get these UFL connectors hooked up to the O3 air unit they can go on either connector it's not really it doesn't really matter which one they go on there's one there we go got both of those hooked up make sure those are secured down and now we can take that little plate that fell off this right here we're gonna just put this back on to secure that in place there we go hold it right there take the other screw all right so now that we've got the antennas all secured to this it's time to put the O3 air unit into this little cage now the way that this cage sits it sits like that so that's the rear of the Drone right there I can fit it around like that and there is a little cutout for the USB port so make sure that's secured down I'm going to take this and fix it back to the TPU since we're almost done with this rear piece that will sit right like that that's perfect and now we can take our ribbon cable you can either use the one that's included with the O3 air unit or you can use the one that's included in the kit I'm just going to go with the one that came with the O3 air unit because it's a little bit thinner and I'm going to run it right underneath the O3 air unit so it's going to go right like that plugs into that port then make sure it's nice and flat when you put this down looks like it's flat there we go now with that through there this can plug right into this port right here and that is for the O3 air unit that plugs in right like that perfect so now we have our O3 air unit installed let's get the camera secured to the front start by removing these screws that are in the side of the camera we aren't going to use these screws when we're mounting it on this the frame actually came with the screws that we need so you can save these cool so these screws aren't long enough to go through the carbon fiber and the TPU so we'll take these M2 by one of these 18 or something so take these longer screws and these are going to be the ones that actually hold the camera so I'm going to run this coaxial cable around that you could have it go underneath the flight controller and that might actually make it a little cleaner should I do that no I'm not I'm going to run it right on top of the board right like that and now you can line up the holes in the side of the camera with the holes in the TPU secure it down yeah that one and now we'll just do this one all right and there's our camera all right so now we're going to be doing some soldering to the flight controller so I'm going to use some of the included um metal nuts to kind of just keep the flight controller from moving around a lot I'm probably just going to use two of them but these are going to go right on these gold screws you don't have to screw them on like crazy all right so I got those two nuts on there just to kind of hold it down while I'm soldering the rest of the components all right since we're kind of working with up here let's get our beeper on next so with the Beeper what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually just take the TPU piece out and we're gonna have to modify it a little bit to fit our beeper I'm not removing those screws completely I just want to make it so that I can take the Beeper Mount off take these out for a second now here is the beeper so this is going to connect to a couple pads on the flight control they even give us a little zip tie we're not going to need that because we have this Mount that's specifically for this all right so here's our beeper here's a little cage we're going to be putting it in as you can see it fits pretty nicely but it's not quite tall enough so what I'm going to do is I'm going to modify this a little bit just so that it fits this beeper so to do that I'm going to take some side cutters I'm going to cut some of these top pieces off so that they're just not there and that's going to allow this beeper to fit all the way through I'm going to try just having that one right there but we may have to remove that one too so now so now I'll take the beeper put it through here pull this back a little bit there we go perfect so now that's holding it in place and this one fits nicely I'm not sure what beeper this is made for I've um I bet hdlrc has their own beeper that is meant for this but this one clearly works pretty good too and you have the battery in there so nice now we can take the plug since it's up high enough we'll plug this in right here we have access to the little button that's right next to it cool let's put this in the Drone I'm gonna take the two standoffs that I just removed and put those back in right like that and now feed this underneath the camera coaxial cable right like that line those standoffs up and screw it down I'm going to remove the camera real quick just to kind of keep it out of the way while we're working with the flight controller I think it's just going to be a little bit easier so we're not like fumbling around that coaxial cable going to the camera pick up the camera and move it where we got to move it so now we have clear access to the flight controller and we can solder up our wires keep it nice and clean we've got a B plus B minus and then a ground so we're going to be using these three pads for the buzzer that we just installed so same thing as before take some flux I'm just going to put flux all over this board because we're going to be doing a lot of soldering tin these pads all right so let's hook up the red wire first red is going to be Z Plus it's going right there perfect next is yellow and yellow is going to bz minus right next to that one and then ground goes right next to that cool now our buzzer is hooked up now let's get the GPS hooked up so I'm going to move the camera back towards the front and move it over to the side because the pads that we're going to be working with are right here this whole top row right here the 5 volt TX RX SDA scl so we're going to use that top row of pads for the GPS all right so now let's get our GPS hooked up so with our GPS we got this power plug one end will plug into the GPS the other end does have a plug on it but we don't have that plug on this fly controller so you can just cut it off I already cut this one off and we're going to solder these wires right up to the flight controller before we do that I want to show you guys a quick trick with getting faster GPS lock using that copper tape that I mentioned earlier all right so taking the wire that was included for the GPS what you want to do is coil it up so it's nice and tight like that leave yourself a little bit of room because you want to be able to move these wires around a little bit when you're soldering but you basically want it to be right like that so now we're going to take the copper tape and we're just going to wrap it around the GPS wire start right at the top and just kind of rotate this wire wrapping it in the copper tape all right so I got the GPS wire all wrapped up not quite until the end but pretty close this is going to be good enough so what we want to do now is take our flux pin and we're going to solder a black wire to this somewhere on here and it's going to attach to our ground so I'm just gonna put a little solder on the copper right like that that's perfect now I'm just going to take a loose black wire you could use any wire you could pull one from one of these plugs that you know you're not going to use I'm going to solder this end to the solder that I just put on there splice this a little bit put some solder on this end right here to just tin it we've got our blob solder right here perfect now with that on I'm going to cut the wire so that it's the exact same length as these ones and that wire is going to connect to the same ground that's on our flight controller as the GPS so now another thing that I have you could probably use any tape for this but this is kind of like a fabric tape this stuff is like really sticky but it's perfect for this because you just need you know that much and you're good you could also use heat shrink I don't know so now with this tape I'm just going to wrap it around make sure all of the metal is covered because that is technically acting as a ground there you go there's your GPS wire I know it looks weird but trust me this is going to help you expose the wire on these so like I said we're going to be working with these six pads right here you've got a ground 5 volt tx6 rx6 SDA and sco that's all we're going to need for this plug I already put some flux on there but we'll do it again just to be safe tin these pads we've got scl SDA rx6 tx6 5 volts and ground just to get it out of the way I'm going to do ground first so with that coiled up let's pre-tin all of these wires all right we got ground right here it's good all right there's the ground now with that holding it in place we can get five volts hooked up right next to that it's five volts the white is hooking up next to the TX six pad and then we have yellow and that's hooking up to rx6 so blue it's going to SDA and then green is going to scl perfect cool now we've got our GPS hooked up so this I'm going to feed through the TPU Mount and then we should be able to get it hooked up to our GPS so this is all kind of a little tight back here but there's a cut out on the TPU piece for the wire so I'm just going to feed this right through here and eventually it'll pop out you don't have a lot of slack to work with you get a little bit but when you plug in the GPS in you're going to want this side up so plug it in right like that do some tweezers to hold it in place if you got to I felt it click in now the GPS is just going to click right into place right like that this heat shrink around this you don't have to take the heat shrink off in fact I'd probably just keep the heat shrink on there foreign there we go there's our GPS so now we can secure this down again and take the screwdriver we'll get the rear standoffs kind of lined up with those screws next up let's get our receiver on here I'm going to get the antennas mounted first and then we'll move on to the receiver so this one I'm not going to install yet this one we're going to run the cable there's a little bit of space kind of in the rear right here so I'm going to run the cable up through that through the top and the antenna is going to sit right in here this one is also meant for an immortal T style antenna the way that this one's going to mount you have this little TPU piece and it took me a little while to figure out what the hell this was and how it worked but it's pretty cool you slide the UFL connector through here like that and then this antenna is going to sit right like this so you fold it like that and now this is going to sit on the Beeper the Beeper actually has its own little hole and they include a screw that goes through and attaches to that so let's get that secured down there you go so you got one Immortal tube antenna back here and then you got the other one right up here so let's hook up the receiver now the receiver that I'm using is the TBS Crossfire nanodiversity so what we're going to be doing is we've got tons of pads on this thing but we're really only going to be using four we've got ground here I'll try and point these out to you so you can see what they are ground five volt channel one which is going to be TX and then Channel 2 is going to be RX the rest of these pins you don't have to worry about flux it now I'll put some solder on those pads just to Tin them and get them ready five volts Channel 1 or TX 2 or RX perfect they include a little bag of wires with the receiver so you have tons of wires so I'm going to pick out a red one use that ground and then we need TX and RX and save the rest of these wires for a rainy day ground five volt next we'll have green btx and then we'll have yellow BRX cool let's get it soldered up to the flight controller so with these wires on the receiver we're going to hook this up to uart one so RX1 and tx1 are right here we've got a 5 volt right next to it this is right next to the pads that we're using for the buzzer so we've got five volt RX1 tx1 and then right in the middle right here we've got a ground so I'm going to use those four pads for our receiver I'm gonna put a little bit more flux on those pads since it's going to dried up at this point foreign those four pads that we're going to be using we've got ground rate or five volts right here RX TX ground we'll start with five volts get that soldered on there it's good next we'll do ground because we're going to have the green TX wire going above that so just to keep it nice and tidy ground and then green is going to TX on here so we're going to want to connect that to RX on our flight controller so this is going to be hooked up to RX1 and then yellow we'll get hooked up to tx1 there we go I think that that is all the soldering we're gonna have to do so I'm going to turn that off there's our receiver all right so before we go much further why don't we secure the camera down to the frame since we're pretty much done with everything up here foreign this part goes right underneath screws into those standoffs make sure these little carbon fiber pieces fix down into the bottom of the plate looks good got the xt60 up here let's take the four nuts that were included and we'll secure down the flight controller to the Drone all right so we're just about ready to put the top cover on this thing and hop over to the computer and give it a Quick tune the last thing we got to do is secure Our receiver now since I'm using a receiver like the TBS Crossfire diversity this is a bigger receiver if you're using something like an elrs a smaller elrs receiver or maybe even a crossfire Nano RX you'd probably be able to get away with putting the receiver up front here like maybe next to the camera or maybe above the buzzer or something but since I'm working with limited space on this drone we don't really have any more space inside the frame so where I'm actually going to put the receiver is underneath the Drone in between these carbon fiber plates so all I'm going to do now is put some heat shrink around this we'll get these antennas hooked up and I'll show you guys where exactly I'm going to put it underneath here one so I'm going to take the receiver put it underneath the GPS cable that's going to kind of keep the antennas in line where they need to be zip tie that after the fact and now we have the GPS or the uh this isn't the GPS the receiver I'm going to go underneath these motor wires it's going to be able to keep everything kind of in this area and now the receiver is just right on the side there and I can tuck it right underneath the frame and we'll add a couple zip ties to just keep that nice and secure in one spot all right so I'm happy with how these antennas are all kind of ran I have this front Immortal T antenna just kind of running along the top of the stack same with this one this one's going right over to the O3 air unit this is the one in the rear and all I'm going to do now is just kind of put some zip ties down I do want to put some zip ties on the arms I want to put a zip tie on these wires basically just use zip ties to just kind of secure everything down and make sure that it stays nice and tidy now before we put our top plate on we got to put some straps on and the frame came with two straps one of them I'm going to just put right in the back you have this little lip right here I'm going to slide it right underneath this and you'll see why I do this in a minute Just Gonna Keep it right like that and then this other strap is going to go right through here like that and then up through the other side so then you can have the strap right like this so that's that's how you want the strap to look now we're not going to do the same on the rear because we don't have enough room with the O3 air unit in there plus these wires so what I'm going to do is we get this back here that's going to be the rear strap and then this is the front strap xd60 goes through this hole right there line up the camera mounts in the top make sure all your cables are looking good and in a good spot you get the O3 lined up that just clicks into place and the rest of these things should fall into place too make sure your antenna isn't pinched under there cool it's a little tight you do have to kind of push it down a little bit you don't have a lot of room to work with in this Frame so now take the screws that were included with the frame and just kind of screw the top plate down and this strap just goes right like that dude look at this thing this thing is clean brother all right last thing to test is power now you can test this throughout the build to make sure that you're not bridging stuff as you go when you do test it I would highly recommend using something like a smoke stopper so when I plug this in here we want the green led to stay on and we'll probably hear everything start up if this led turns off that's telling me that I have a short somewhere and we're gonna have to take this apart and take a look at what's causing that looks good everything sounds good I saw a little LED on the Beeper I can see LEDs on the flight controller and I got a red LED on the O3 air unit so everything looks good that's what you'll want this is pretty much oh I didn't even think of that the Beeper that we have in here actually has its own built-in battery so when you unplug the battery from the Drone this will probably just keep beeping since it has its own Battery Source so to turn it off you're going to need something thin I'm going to be using these scissors if I was on the go I'd probably just be using the tweezers I have in my bag but you can kind of see the switch here I can see it click it and hold it for a minute you'll hear those beeps and you're good so now it should stop beeping nice let's take this over to the computer and tune it all right first thing we're going to do we're going to launch beta flight make sure your drone is plugged in we're not going to need a battery plugged in for this part right here make sure it pops up here and make sure you're running 10.9 if you're not running 10.9 make sure you update to it we're going to go update firmware if you're not running 4.4 I am already running 4.4 but if you're not you can Auto detect this should pop up 4.4.1 full chip arrays load firmware flash firmware and then you're good I already have that so I'm just going to hit connect and you'll have these things pop up right here we don't have a motor output protocol and the accelerometer is enabled but not calibrated so let's do those things first let's calibrate the accelerometer if you're tilting the Drone forward and back and it's not reflecting correctly on the screen you'll have to adjust that I'll show you how to do that later but right now since mine's fine I'm going to hit calibrate accelerometer and then let's hop down to the motors Tab and we'll change this this is what was giving us that error in the beginning we'll change this to D shot 600 and while we're at it we'll turn on bi-directional D shot and then save reboot and we shouldn't have any pop-ups initially right here perfect so let's disconnect from this and we're actually going to hop over to BL heli32 and when we're doing this we're going to have to plug a battery into the Drone so do that now foreign [Music] so since we have a motor output protocol selected now now it'll connect to this if you don't have that motor output protocol it's not going to be able to recognize it and be a heli Suite so we'll hit connect it's going to read the ESC and then read setup you should see the escs all pop up right here make sure they're all running the same firmware they should be I'd be surprised if they weren't and the main thing that we're going to do here we're actually not going to change any of these settings all you want to do is just double check and make sure that you're running 96 kilohertz pwm frequency we're running 96 on frequency high and frequency low so that's perfect so let's disconnect from this we're all set so this so we'll disconnect from BL heli we can close that and we'll open betaflight backup connect to the Drone now let's hop over to the ports tab so I put the receiver on uart1 so we're going to turn serial RX on for uart1 I'm going to go down to uart3 that's where we have the O3 air unit plugged in and we're actually going to use a preset for this so you don't technically have to turn this on right now and you don't have to select this VTX MSP DisplayPort because we're going to use preset so I'm actually going to keep those off let's go to uart6 which is where our GPS is we can select GPS keep that on auto and we can hit save reboot now let's hop down to let's do presets key in O3 we'll set up the O3 air unit for the OSD elements map to DisplayPort set HD OSD perfect and like I said we used uart3 so we're going to select this one pick and now that one's selected and now we can select another preset which is our long range preset and it's kind of the tune for the Drone and I have noticed that these UAV Tech presets work awesome big props to UAV tech for these I use this on my cinema my long range drones I've tested it on on freestyle drones and they all fly awesome so we're going to go with this one mix setup very easy we'll click this little drop down menu medium build quality that's good RPM filter I like to use RPM filtering when it's available so we'll select that and then we're running 96 kilohertz pwm so we're going to select this and deselect that one I don't use Dynamic idle since it's more so for prop wash and I don't really notice a lot of prop wash if any with long range drones since it's not really freestyling around so select these three and you should be good I pick agree I know it's Savory boot awesome let's hop over to the receiver tab now I have my receiver I already bound it and as you can see it thinks the throttle is roll and it thinks the pitch is throttle and it's all messed up so very easy to change this go to Channel map and change it from the default to Spectrum which is taer as opposed to aert I think hit save and you should see these values change so now it knows that throttle is this one throttles throttle rolls roll Yaz yaw and that's perfect we don't have to do anything else in this hit save now we'll hop down to modes uncheck that we'll add an arm switch flick the switch that you want to use for arm and adjust these brackets to wherever the little yellow kind of dot is will go down I always add Horizon to long range drones just because it's kind of an added peace of mind and makes long range flying a little easier we'll do GPS rescue so this is our GPS rescue switch right here and since I'm using a three-way switch that's going to be GPS enabled that's going to be GPS enabled and then that's GPS off so we have a big range here for GPS I have that aux 6 dedicated purely for GPS rescue we'll go down we'll turn on our beeper flip over after crash always and I think that's pretty good I don't think we really need anything else on I'm happy with that hit save hide unused modes now just kind of move all the switches around and make sure that the correct thing is lighting up when you move it it's good hop back up to the top and let's just make sure that all this is all set so since we applied that preset you can see that it's enabled configuration MSP is enabled for uart3 so this is the o3r unit and then you also have VTX MSP plus DisplayPort perfect go down to configuration we've got eight kilohertz gyro update frequency and PID Loop perfect you can name your drone I usually change the arming degrees to 180. make sure air Mode's on OSD is on and if you used any LED strips you can turn it on here most of those will keep off GPS you're going to have a box down here since we have our GPS uart selected and I usually select Autobot and use Galileo this looks good we'll turn it on here and if you had any issues with your drone rotating in a weird Direction so if you put the flight controller on like backwards or something you would have to change the sensor alignment right here since mine's on the right way we don't have to adjust any of that so we'll just hit save reboot all right so now it's time to set up our GPS rescue settings since we have it all set up in our modes tab we have the GPS rescue switch and we've gone into configuration and made sure that we have GPS on we have it set up through the port and everything now it's time to go into the failsafe tab now if you don't have a Fail-Safe tab you're going to have to turn on enable expert mode and that's just this little switch right here when you turn it on you'll see failsafe you get GPS there's a couple other ones that pop up but we're going to be doing everything in the failsafe so we're not going to be changing anything in valid pulse range settings we're going to mainly just be looking at Channel fallback I like to set throttle to hold instead of Auto this is basically just going to tell it to hold the last throttle position that it received from my controller and then we're going to set the switch that we've made GPS rescue which is aux 6. we're going to change that to set now if you remember the range that we had on our modes for GPS rescue we had the minimum set to 1300 and the maximum set to 2100 I think so we're going to have to choose number in between that to set the value to so that it triggers GPS rescue so I'm going to set this 1500 work I'm going to change it to 1700 because that's perfectly in the middle of the bracket so now we're all set over on this side if I'll say switch we don't have to worry about stage two so this is when an actual fail safe happens you have guard time right here so this is after the radio disconnects from the Drone how long it takes for stage two Fail-Safe to kick in it's set to 1.5 um so once one and a half seconds I wouldn't adjust that I think that's pretty good you're definitely going to have to change this from drop to GPS rescue because obviously we don't want a stage 2 Fail-Safe to just have the Drone drop and we don't want it to just land wherever it is we want it to try and come back home so that is GPS rescue so let's turn this on and now you can adjust some of these settings you have the angle of the Drone the initial altitude all of these settings are pretty good I honestly keep these the same the only one that I typically change is minimum satellites and I usually put six because six is typically good enough to get a good lock on where the home position is and once you start flying you're going to acquire more satellites so that's pretty good keep allow arming without fix this is basically like if you had this on and you didn't have six satellites you could still arm the Drone but then you're not going to get a valid home point so you could have zero satellites and still fly away and you actually won't have GPS rescue because you have this switch on so make sure that you keep this off altitude mode maximum altitude that's basically just the height that the Drone will fly to before it flies back home so I keep this at maximum altitude and then sanity checks of Fail-Safe only once you have all that all set now we can hit save reboot now the last thing we got to do is set up our Motors and make sure those are ready to go so when you're doing this make sure you don't have props on you're going to have to lightly touch the motors so you can't have props on when you do this just don't do it so you're going to need a battery plugged in to do this and the first thing we're gonna have to do is if you remember when we installed the ESC we actually installed it we actually installed is that the GPS do we have GPS already huh dude that's sick that's how fast you get GPS satellites when you wrap that little wire so let's go back to the motors tab um we've got let's see uh reorder Motors so what you can do is you can understand the risks and you can just spin up motor one and see which one is spinning and I can see that motor 4 is spinning right now when I do two motor three and then when I do Moto 3 motor 2 is spinning and motor four is going to be motor one so we have to remap this and the easiest way to do this is reorder Motors understand the risks again remove your propellers and we'll hit start and now click on the spinning motor so I can see that motor 4 is spinning right now so it's basically looking for motor one so we're going to click this since this is the one that's actually spinning motor 3 is spinning now so we're telling betaflight that this is motor 3. this one's spinning now so this is motor two and then this is motor one I need save perfect now we'll go back to the motors Tab and recheck this spin them one at a time and make sure that motor one is spinning so now motor one is spinning motor two motor two is good Moto three and motor four perfect so now we just have to change the motor Direction so we're going to check this I'm going to spin these we can spin them all at once if you wanted to just lightly and just lightly touch the motors and see which direction they're spinning so I can tell right now that motor one is spinning clockwise which is what we want the motor 2 is spinning counterclockwise which is perfect motor 3 is spinning counterclockwise and motor four is spinning clockwise so we actually don't have to change any motor Direction at all if you did have to change the motor Direction what you would do is Select motor Direction and this wizard makes it just as easy as reordering the motors understand the risks go to the wizard and you can start spin the motors and feel the motors [Music] and it's going to change the direction and then when you're done you just hit stop Motors and close and it should be all set so now the last thing you got to do is just set up your OSD this isn't something I'm going to show you how to do you should have HD selected here just kind of select the values that you want to see on the screen and rearrange them accordingly and you'll have your OSD elements in your goggles right like that that's how I like to have my OSD set up you get the altitude longitude latitude how many satellites you get the direction home your alerts the amount of time that you've been flying battery voltage and your receiver link quality hit save and we're all set all right so now that we got this thing all set up in betaflight this is ready to fly all we got to do is put some props on and if you remember the prop Direction we've got this motor and this motor spinning counterclockwise and then this motor and this motor spinning clockwise so take the appropriate props and then take the included prop nuts and secure those down all right all right guys look at this this thing looks so freaking cool let's go fly in the mountains and get some nice cinematic footage with the O3 air unit [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] this thing is sick I absolutely love how this flies and how the footage looks out of the O3 air unit the footage that you just saw was filmed in 2.7 K on the O3 air unit with an nd32 the ND filters that I'm using on this drone are the flywu ND filters The Wider ND filters like the I think this Free Will and there's a couple other ones that are more so meant for the Avada I don't think that that will fit on this Frame so I would go with the flywheel ND filters like this one thing that I want to make sure that I mentioned is that I did test out some bi-blade props so I picked these up from race day quads and these are HQ prop 7 by 4.5 props and I do notice slightly better flight time over the tri-blades that are on here now so I will be using these going forward on this drone if you have any suggestions on buy blades or tri-blade props that you think I could get better flight time with leave those in the comment section down below so when I filmed that flight footage I had these tri-blade props on here and I didn't really know what kind of flight time I'd be getting out of my two lithium-ion packs so I didn't push it too crazy but after some testing I'm seeing almost 25 minute long flights with this 5200 6s lithium ion battery and those HQ by blade props I also tested out this 3000 milliamp 6s lithium ion pack I was seeing about 15 minute flights with this one since I didn't really know what kind of flight time I'd be getting when filming that footage I only flew about three kilometers away from myself knowing now that I can easily get 20 minutes minimum out of this setup with the bi-blade props I feel like we could potentially max out the range on the O3 air unit and as far as the crossfire diversity receiver goes I'm not even worried about the range with that that thing's going to be just fine so with this new testing under my belt I already have plans to take this thing up to the White Mountains I want to try and fly to an island off the shore of Beverly Massachusetts if you're familiar with the area I pretty much want to fly from Beverly out to Baker's Island which is pretty much like four and a half miles I've never flown that but I feel like with 25 minute long fights I should be able to do that pretty easily with this so definitely keep an eye out for a lot more footage coming from this drone so overall I love this build very happy with this Frame I love that it comes with the diversity antenna mounts out of the box the entire build is a little on the expensive side but since you have the O3 air unit in there you can get some very nice footage out of it and you don't have to worry about the added weight of a GoPro let's see what this weighs so dry weight without a battery we're looking at about 633 grams when you add a 3000 milliamp 6s lithium ion pack like this you're looking at 932 grams and then when you add something like this 5200 6s lithium ion pack you're looking at 1.23 kilograms so definitely up there with weight but since you don't have the GoPro you don't really have to worry about it the thing honestly flies awesome with that 5200 the last thing I have to cover I know people will be asking me to build this drone for them and this isn't something that I offer I just straight up don't have the time to do that when it comes to fpv drones I feel like if you really want to get into fpv you should know how to build or work on your drones and that's the whole reason that I make videos like this to show you how easy it is to actually do plus you can just follow this video do it yourself save a bunch of money plus you'll be a lot more confident in fixing your drone when you crash so links to everything that I use in this video will be down in the description if you notice that some of the parts are sold out usually parts do sell out when I make a build video like this but I will try and post as many alternative links as I can if you want to know the parts that I use and build videos like this before the video comes out be sure to check out my patreon because my patrons have had access to this list of parts for about a week or so so they have had a head start on everyone that's watching this build video today so if parts are sold out it's probably because a handful of my patreons pick them up if you enjoyed this video make sure you subscribe to the channel leave the video a like and if you have any questions or comments or any suggestions of other things that I could add to this drone to potentially get longer flight time leave a comment down below [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: TRONCAT FPV

Views: 57,799

Keywords: cinematic fpv, drone, racing drone build, racing drone, custom drone, reelsteady, cinematic gopro footage, fpv drone, Cinewhoop

Id: d2NiH5ciV5c

Length: 69min 40sec (4180 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 12 2023