RCexplorer Tri-Copter v3 Build!

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It's been awhile but I found my way back over here Recently a buddy of mine sold me a Blade 350QX on the cheap. It needed a few small things done to it and in the end I had to send it to Horizon Hobby but the guy that handled my repair did good by me. He upheld what I consider to be great customer service and replaced the Quad with a 350 QX2 brand new in the box! Not only did he warranty it out he did it with me being the second owner of the quad, did not ask for any form of receipt and he upgraded me into a newer one.

The Blade lead me to buy a Walker Devo 12s, I flashed it with Deviation firmware 4.01 and have to admit that learning the transmitter is actually the hardest part of flying. The way you program these things and can have an endless amount of mixes is ridiculous, oh and don't make me get into virtual channels....

Ok, enough blabbering...I decided that after seeing my buddies built quads that I wanted to build something myself. Built quads are soooo much better than these proprietary ones that Blade or DJI etc offer! I set out on my journey to find something that appealed to me and I stumbled upon the Tri-Copter V3 from Rcexplorer, David Windestal designs and builds these kits. He seems to be an upstanding guy and has a butt load of knowledge in that Swedish head of his. So thank you to David for a great kit and thanks to you guys for tagging along in my build!

Photos will follow this post along with what I started building up last night.

 

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So far this is everything I have ordered for the build, picked up mostly everything from Hobbyking. Also got some heatshrink locally from Altex and grabbed up a USBasp programmer from ebay. Turns out it was a 10 pin model so I need to get a 10 to 6 pin adapter before I can upload Steveis firmware to the KK2 Board.

The motors I purchased way before I even bought the quad, I did not pay any mind to the maximum diameter the Yaw mechanism will accept and ended up getting motors that were to big. These are 50mm in diameter and the largest Davids yaw mechanism can accept is something like 38mm. The reason why I opted for the pancake style iPower 4008Q motors were due to longer run times because of better efficiency from the pancake style design. This was an issue I later realized I would have to overcome or be forced to purchase different motors so I made it a point for this to be the first piece of the kit I built.

I gathered everything I thought I would need to make this work, the sliver hub in the picture was picked up from Servo City but the hole spacing was slightly to large for it work. Granted I could of shimmed the Yaw mechanism up some to give me or surface area to drill into but I did not want to alter the COG of the boom components. At first I opted to go with a Futaba adapter to allow use for larger splined horns, it would of given me the proper spacing but none of the larger servo horns allowed me to get far enough into the surface area of the Yaw mech. To figure anything out I needed a drill to continue and had no batteries charged up so I pushed this to the side and started to build my power distribution cable.

Simply put it's 12 gauge wire soldered together with some 18 gauge wire with bullets and an EC5 plug, David uses one from Hobbyking but they were out of stock and so the next best thing was to build me one.

Ok batteries on the drill are charged up, back to the thinking board. After some playing around with the adapter I decided to just stick with the standard futaba splined servo horns and use the little brass bushings that you get with most servos. I had two lengths to play with and opted for the shorter ones to hopefully reduced any added stress this will end up having. I lined everything up, drilled the holes and started putting the Yaw mechanism together, it seems rigid enough to uphold normal usage but I don't think it will hold up well in a crash. I ended up filling the holes with some thing CA to help strengthen things up a bit. I am going to order a few more yaw mechanisms to have on hand but I am also going to maybe 3D print some sort of spline extension piece. I tried searching for one but couldn't find what I needed, if anyone knows of some sort of double sided spline to spline extension piece please let me know!

Moving on it it now time to mount of the motor and start desoldering the ESC wires. I didn't capture every step I did from this point forward but I tried to capture the important parts. I desoldered all the wires on the esc, added a long servo wire, the proper length of 18 gauge power wire and shortened the bullet wires that connect to the motor. All of the wires are ran through the boom to clean things up and also help protect them from the elements and crashes.

I cut a piece of foam padding the shape of the ESC and got my heatshrink ready, the foam is simply to protect the circuitry from being damaged. The esc is ziptied to the bottom of the boom and will be rubbing on the zipties from the other components.

I forgot to capture what I did to the servo wires earlier so here it is now, I spliced them and just added a length of servo wire and soldered/heatshrinked it all together.

I cut the motor wires and soldered bullets on them and then mounted it up to the boom. Next I soldered bullets on the power wires coming out of the other side of the boom and tested it all out. I may upload a video at some point of the Yaw mechanism in action.

That's all for now, I head back to work today so I won't be messing with this again for atleast a good two weeks. I am hoping to get it all done next time I am home! I still have to program the KK2 board, finish the other two booms and then put the frame, camera/battery tray together and bring it all together. Thanks for looking!

 

[hamz9561]

Looks great so far.

 

[Greywolf74]

freakin' sweet dude! looks good!

 

[alpinehyperlite]

What's the benefit of a tri vs a quad+?

 

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Thanks guys! It sucks that I am at work, I was brainstorming today and think I have a much better way of doing the yaw mechanism. We shall see when I get home

@alpinehyperlite - I wouldn't say that a tri has any specific benefit over a quad other than it technically should be cheaper to build. One less motor, one less esc but then you have a servo to worry about. Also depending on how you build the tri, the frame can be made out of wood, zip-ties and a few screws! My buddy who got me into the blade argues that a tri is not symmetrical so therefore is not as easy to fly and is less stable. Although I will say that the way I am building this Tri it will be a slow fly and tailored mainly toward FPV....Well when I get an FPV setup.

 

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After having some time to think I brainstormed a few different ways I could change the yaw mechanism up to be more structural. Elliot at my local hobby store came up with a few ideas of his own too and the one I decided to go with was just simply raising the motor. At first I was skeptical as I figured the extra motor height would put a lot more strain on the servo and cause it to die sooner than expected. Although after finishing things up and testing it appears the servo is actually going to benefit from this versus my original way.

Anyways on to the pictures...I happen to have some 1/4" thick plywood still laying around from when I did my Charge station way back when and traced out one of the motor mounts and made a spacer to put under the motor. The spacer, coupled with trimming the top mounting tab on the servo worked perfect!

The newer designed yaw mechanisms They are a bit beefier than before!

and the finished yaw mechanism

I also decided to pick up a telemetry module for my Walkera receiver, the Orangerx that I picked up off of HK does not support the spektrum telemetry module. :/

Uploading the Steveis firmware version 19 to the KK2.1.5 board, after getting all the proper files it was a breeze to update! I then proceeded to get the basic programming done on the KK2 board. This is my first time dealing with any sort of FC (Flight Controller) so I was pretty lost. Good thing David made a how to video specific for setting up the KK2 board with this Tri!

 

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Moving on I started building up the two front booms, desolder all wires from ESC's and resolder using 18awg wire for the +/- and shortening the bullet connector wires for the motor. Once done with that I soldered on a longer JST connection and then shrinkwrapped together with a piece of foam to protect the side that will mount against the boom. I also cut the motor wires to shorten them up and resoldered the bullets back on.

Mounted everything up on the booms and got the front booms finished

Time to move on to the frame, I had to sand the bottom plate to prep it for gluing the piano wire hangers together with the 3D printed parts.

The frame is going together now, it was a bit tricking getting the booms on and getting the screws past the wires running inside.

Getting the bullets and everything connected up...and then bam, I have a tri-copter that I can start programming further!

but wait a minute, why can't I stuff all these dang wires inside this tiny ass space? Hmm let me think things through....After a day of messing with different lengths of wire on the squid I made I decided to eliminate the squid all together and make things a bit simpler. Honestly I don't know how David or anyone else manages to get all those wires inside that stinking small frame.

So what I opted to do was solder bullets onto all these esc's for the power wires and run them all together to two bullets that will connect to the battery pigtail. It was a pain in the butt getting all that figured out but the end result was a clean looking Tri-Copter and minimal wires to have to worry about getting damaged or coming disconnected.

Alright now that I have all that figured out it was time to mount up the rest of the electronics...The KK2 board and the Walkera RX. I used double sided sticky tape, everything actually mounted up pretty good!

I then needed to figure out mounting the antenna's, I soldered three layers of clear heatshrink onto them and then mounted em up using some 1/8" wire clips, ziptied to the booms.

Time to start programming the KK2 board a bit more....

I also started getting the EC5 connectors soldered up on the batteries and balanced the props.

and the finished product!

I went ahead and did my maiden flight today, the Tri is flying decent but I think could be tuned a bit better. The wind was blowing pretty freaking hard today so It was all over the place. Here is a short clip my girlfriend recorded for me

I really enjoyed this build, it was fairly simple and painless....Pretty straight forward and well what can I say it came out looking badass!!!! I'm going to work on getting LED strips fixed to the booms tonight so that I can do some night flying after I get the kinks tuned out! Thanks for looking and enjoy, feel free to ask any questions. Also if anyone else is interested in building one of these you can grab the kits up at rcexplorer.se

 

[Greywolf74]

Looks great bro! Happy Flying!

 

[Rolex]

Really nice build. Well done.

 

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Thanks guys!

I changed a few things around on the Tri, I was having a problem with the KK2 board picking up vibrations from touching the screws on the frame where it was mounted and also the Accelerometer chip not being in the center of the frame. So I went to the local fastener store today and picked up some m3x20mm button head hex screws. They did not carry 18mm long that I needed for the boom stops and arms but I will get those at a later date. With the new screws in the frame I am now able to mount the KK2 board without it touching anything but the double sided tape I use for mounting it! Hopefully I will get some flying in tomorrow to see if it helped any.

Also why I was at it I got my LEDs in today from Commonsense RC! I decided to shorten the +/- wires coming off the ESCs so I could mount them a little further back and get the LEDs soldered up. I am not sure yet if I like them, they seem like they might get in the way or get torn/trashed fairly easy in a crash, since they are 12+V I either had to run a separate 3S battery or wire directly to the ESCs. Obviously adding a 3S battery is out of the question as it would affect my AUW (all up weight) and just be another thing to get in the way. Of course soldering directly to the ESCs is also troublesome because if the LEDs short out, I have no protection for the main components.

Anyways, here is the Tri with the LEDs

Back Boom:

Front Boom:

Video of them in action:

 

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Well I'm sad to say that today I lost the tri-copter

I believe that what happened is the front left prop either broke or came off mid-flight.The tri started to become uncontrollable despite my efforts of trying to bring it back into a level state. My last ditch efforts were to chop the throttle and let it fall out of the sky in hopes that I could find it in the woods. I have an idea of where it might be at but after 2 hours of searching I came up empty handed, I will start my search again tomorrow as soon as the weather in good and the sun is up. Please send me some good vibes to find it, my GoPro was also attached to it, if the wifi would of been on I imagine I could of used my phone to track it but well that isn't an option. I did have copper foil on the Gopro and was thinking maybe there is some way to bounce a signal off the copper foil. If I don't find it tomorrow then it will be atleast two weeks before I can search for it again and I am sure by that time it will be gone.

 

[alpinehyperlite]

That sucks. Good luck.

 

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Well no luck today, started looking at 10:30am until about 3:30pm. I downloaded a GPS logger on my phone, strapped it in my buddies quad and flew out a few different paths of where I remembered seeing it. Then using that app I tracked those logs on foot. The area I'm searching is about 400 yards long by about 200 yards wide in really dense woods with random open areas. I wish it would of crashed Into one of those open areas :/ the biggest issue with the crash was the forward tree lines are taller than the back treelines, so once I lost sight of it who knows where it went.

If only I had an FPV setup, maybe I could find it.

 

[hamz9561]

It sucks that it got away, but maybe it'll still be there. Or maybe Sasquatch will use it to keep the pesky humans from bothering for cameos in Jack Links commercials....

 

[alpinehyperlite]

Damn.........

 

[Rolex]

Oh, man. That's really bad news. If it still has any battery power left, wouldn't you be able to get a beeping from the RX when you power up your radio?

 

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Yeah it does suck, my stomach was in knots most all day. Hopefully Sasquatch will keep it safe for me until I return back from work in 14 days. I'm still going to search for it some more for sure but I'm not finding myself just walking circles as I don't know where else to look :/

As for the battery, I believe it disconnected in the crash, the kk2 board has a lost model alarm which I had set to go off. It's a very loud audible tone, also the board is also set with a low voltage alarm, again a very loud audible beep. I never heard any beeps, chirps, nothing...I walked around the first hour the day I lost it with my TX trying to arm it and see if I could hear anything. NADA.....

 

[Greywolf74]

that sucks bro...I hope it stays ok.

 

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I found out today that about the cheapest way to get Into an FPV setup is with a C-Go1. Also the C-Go2 but that one is $500...yikes! Anyways if anyone here is selling one or knows anyone who is selling a C-Go1 with or without the GB200 gimbal for a decent price let me know! I also posted up a wtb ad on rctech