Frame: Done

Hi again!

Yesterday I basically built an aluminum frame for my quadrocopter in a six-hour marathon. Before I go into detail, I’ve got some pictures for you:

As you can see, the frame mainly consists of square aluminum pipe, which you can buy at any hardware store. The dimensions of the pipe I used are 15.5x15.5x1000mm with a thickness of 1.5mm.

To get the two rods on the same level, I cut halfway through each one so I could put them together to a “plus” form. The whole construction is held together by four screws with 6 mm in diameter and two solid plates, consisting of wood on the top and plexiglass on the bottom (maybe I'll put some LEDs there some day ;-) ).

The topmost plate you see is the “Power Distribution Board”, which will connect all the motor controllers to the battery in the end (I hope the 5mm tracks are enough for 50A peak current :-) ) and also hold the Lisa/M.

So, that’s the new frame, and here comes the status update for the rest of the thing:

First the bad news: I returned my Spektrum DX6i to manufacture because the first channel wasn’t received correctly by the Hobbyking Orange receivers. I also tested with another DX6i, which worked, so I assumed there must be something wrong with my transmitter. Today I was told by the Spektrum support that my receiver works perfectly normal, but I got the DSMX version which obviously has some compatibility problems with my “unofficial” setup. Maybe it’s possible to implement some workaround in the Paparazzi software, or I have to get myself the DSM2-only version of the DX6i.

At least there’s some progress: propellers are ordered and should arrive this week!

So in general, I guess it doesn’t look too bad for my goal of flying this thing at the Chaos Communication Camp (maybe with someone else’s transmitter...).