Quadrocopter hardware is complete!

Hi!

The hardware of my quad is now complete and assembled! Yay! :-)

As pictures say more than a thousand words, here are some photos which show an overview of the whole construction and some details:

The motor controllers are all connected to the central power distribution board (PDB for short), which is also directly connected to the battery. The Lisa/M is mounted in the center of the PDB and rests on a piece of foam rubber, which is a very soft but still tight material. On the one side, the foam rubber prevents short circuits through the copper beneath, on the other side, it helps in mounting the board in level with the frame, as the bottom of Lisa/M is not flat.

The motor cables are held to the frame using Velcro strips. The RC receiver is also held by one of those strips, as you can see in the second photo. The battery is mounted on the bottom also using velcro strips (I hope they will be strong enough when in flight, but as I can lift the quad only holding the battery, I don’t think this will be a problem). Finally, I have added a piece of heat insulation tube (which is light, but quite stable) on each arm of the quad to keep the battery from touching the ground and to act as a damper in case of hard landings :-) .

By the way: the transmitter problem is also solved. There seems to be some problem when building the paparazzi software inside of a 32-bit chroot environment on 64-bit systems. The DX6i transmitter works without any problems when building the software on a real 32-bit system or inside a virtual machine. So, if you want to use paparazzi, too, I recommend to use a real 32-bit system or a VM.

To summarize: The hardware seems to work completely now. I still have some software/configuration problems, which will hopefully be solved soon with some help from the paparazzi team :-) . So I think it’s not long until the first flight!