Bigger frame, bigger arms means longer wires. It' soldering time again!
I gave the motors bullet connectors, and I want to re-use the motors as-is. So with the ESCs further out towards the ends of the arms, I needed longer wires from the main board to the ESCs. Put some bullet connectors on them as well.
Gotta love Modular designs 😃
The signal wires leading from the Arduino board to the ESCs needed to get longer too, of course. I used a bit of RGB LED wire (Red, Green, Blue, and black), mounted a pi header to one end, and connected the white ESC signal wires in order to the RGB cable. Note the black rings around the white wires? That are small pieces of black shrink tube to number the wires according to the motor number they are connected to. Simple, but effective!
The top plate looks like this, now. Note that the Arduino board now is mounted upside down, to protect it's electronics a little better when I crash again.
And crashing I did... Mid-hover, the quad just flipped upside down for no apparent reason. Luckily, that was still on relatively low altitude, so no major damage was apparent immediately. But the question remained: what the * happened? Upon investigating, I noticed one motor running intermittently at low rpm (at high rpm, the same probably happened, but the was not noticable). I decided to check the inside of that motor. A bit of cleaning could not hurt, and the top bearing made some noise while turning. So a drop of oil on that one, and a thorough cleaning and inspection followed.
I discovered that one of the bullet connector solder joints looked like a "cold joint". So I re-did that soldering work.
After re-assembly, the problem was gone, and the quad flew like before, again!
But after a couple of (PID tuning) flights, the problem emerged at onother motor. So I decided to repeat the re-soldering bit for all the motors, just to make sure this wouldn't happen any time soon. That seemed to have done the trick, so far 😃
After this, some more PID tuning, and we are ready for the next chapter: gimbal and camera...
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