 Hey guys, welcome to Rotorite. I'm Lajrib, and today I'm gonna be walking you through a solder-free build. When you want to get into doing FPV, one of the most intimidating things is building the drone. You just want to fly, and everyone's telling you that, well, hey there, before you can start actually enjoying flying, you've got to learn to solder, learn how to set up beta flight. All this stuff that sounds very overwhelming, and you just want to fly. Now, one option that we've been really proud to offer is pre-built drones, and so if you want to skip all that and go straight to flying, we offer drones that are fully built, tuned, and just ready to rip. But if you do want to start doing a little bit of your own building, maybe just nervous about some of the things like soldering and configuring, you're who we had in mind when we put these kits together. You're not gonna need to solder, you're not gonna need to configure, and this drone is gonna be ready to go, ready for shreddy, built by you. This is everything that you need to build one of our drones, and it's gonna be really simple. And then here I've got Bubby's tool pouch with all the tools that you might find in an average FPV pilot. You know wire cutters, and soldering irons, and all sorts of different sized drivers. All you need from this is your two millimeter hex driver, the prop tool, which is a eight millimeter box wrench, a 1.5 millimeter hex driver, a 5.5 millimeter box wrench, double-sided sticky tape. You're gonna need some electrical tape, I strongly recommend you use Loctite. It's gonna prevent your build from vibrating apart. It's gonna make it a lot more robust. That's it. Let's unpack everything. We're gonna start off with the frame. I've got here an HD1 Banny style frame. The first thing we're going to do is assemble the arms to the main plate of the frame. We're gonna start with the main plate, and that's the plate that has these press nuts installed. You've got four arms, and you need this little plate that's gonna go on the bottom. Open up your hardware pack, and find the appropriate length screw. Depending on which exact frame you end up with, this might be a little bit different, but for most of the HD1 line of frames, it's gonna be the 12 millimeter screw. But as a rule of thumb, the screws for the arms on the HD1 series are the longest screws in the package. So you don't need to measure the screws. Just find the eight longest screws. Grab your main plate, these press nuts, which stick up from the carbon fiber, are gonna go on the inside of your drone, and the arms are gonna attach to the bottom of the main plate. Lining up the arms is a little bit like putting together a puzzle piece, but there's really only one way it'll go together. If you have it the wrong way, the screw holes won't line up. Grab your main plate and your arm. Grab a stiffener piece. Line up everything. Now grab one of the screws. Just a little dip in the Loctite. Don't tighten it all the way. Now grab another arm and just start inserting them and working your way around all the screws. Now that we've got all the arms in place with all eight screws threaded in loosely, we can work our way around and really torque them down. So now we've got the main portion of the drone frame assembled, the arms and the main plate, and for the entire HD1 series of frames, the assembly is identical to what you just saw. So this is the Vanny style edition. It's got thinner but thicker arms in a squished X configuration, but we've also got the standard HD1, which is a true X with wider arms, and for longer flights we've got the XR version of the HD1. The assembly is identical for all the different versions, lower brace, four arms, and then the main plate with the long screws threading up and into the press nuts so that they are on the inside. One of the common mistakes we see people make is having the main plate upside down and you'll end up with a gap, like it won't be sitting flush. So you should be able to see very easily if you've got it right. This is how it should look. The only special case is if you do end up working with an XR version, there are different front and rear arms. So have a really close look at orientation, which ones go on the front with relation to the different holes on the main plate. So this build is a little bit trickier just because of that reason, but these other two are very straightforward since the arms are identical. We're going to continue building with the Vanny style arms that we started with. So now we're going to start putting components on the drone and this is where orientation of the drone matters. So even though all the arms are the same, there is a front and a back. So just have a look at the different holes and this is the front with the four M3 holes up front. The rear has these smaller M2 holes for mounting stuff. Set this down with the front forward. So this is the front, this is the right of the drone, this is the left of the drone, this is all relative to the perspective of the drone and me as the builders. So this is what's going to make this build so easy. In these build kits, the electronics you get have pre-soldered connections and so do the motors. Everything is just going to plug into each other. So the motors are just going to plug right into the center unit. This is the 4-in-1 ESC electronic speed controller and what this component does is it converts DC voltage from the battery and outputs AC voltage to a three phase motor. It has four outputs for four motors and it does this according to signals it receives from the flight controller. It's going to plug in here later on. The first step is to install this 4-in-1 ESC onto the frame. You're going to have a hardware pack that comes right along with it. You'll notice that you get these little gummies. These gummies are going to install into the holes of the electronics boards. You just got to work them in, just kind of pinch them, squeeze them in one side, push through on the other with your tool. You're going to do that for both the boards that you get. Take your ESC board and it's going to install on the drone with the power cable coming out the right side of the drone. Grab these ultra long screws that you get with your kit and insert them through. We have these little spacers. These are going to drop right onto the screws and just do that for the four screw holes that are spaced 30 millimeters apart. Now the board is going to go down onto all four screws in the orientation I showed you. We've got our board installed. We're just going to double check our orientation. Again, with our drone down with the front forward, the front beam, this side with the four holes, we've got our power connector coming out on the right side and the motor connector is going forward and back. Everything is looking really good. Now with the board installed, the screws are going to hold themselves in place a bit better because they're gripped by the gummies. Now we're going to start installing our motors. We've got four motors and we've also got four of these quad skids. These are going to give you something to land on and slide on. A good rule of thumb for your motor screws is you want two millimeters of screw to stick up past the carbon fiber. Too little and you won't have enough of the screw threaded into the motor and too much you risk the screw sticking up too far and touching the windings of the motor, which is really bad. If you're not using quad skids, you want the screw to be two millimeters longer than the thickness of the arm and if you are using quad skids, you want it to be four millimeters thicker than the arm. So on this Vanny Style Edition frame, we've got six millimeter arms. I am using quad skids, so we are going to be using ten millimeter screws to attach the motors. We're going to dip our screw in the Loctite. It's going to go into the quad skid. Think about how you want to orientate your quad skid relative to the drone. I like that orientation. Now this bit is what's going to thread into the motor. Just thread it in loosely. It's okay if the quad skid spins around. We'll fix it in a second. Again, that's the hardest part, just getting the first screw done. Grab your next screw. Again, just loosely, we've got two screws in loose. Let's go for number three and four. With all four screws threaded in, now you can crank them down again. Just do the same for all four motors. There we go. So now we get to do the really cool part and start plugging things in. Now the connectors are keyed, so you can't even do it backwards if you wanted to. Get it all lined up. Boom. Your motor is now connected to your ESC. Anyone that's built a drone before, they know that's the time consuming part. Soldering all the motors to the ESCs or it could be worse for using individual ESCs. Soldering the motor to the ESC, soldering the ESC to a power distribution board. So time consuming. This is super easy. No heat, no irons, nothing. So this is going to be great for your first build. Now here's where you can finesse things a little bit. You want to make it look nice, right? So push the connector down so it's against the arm. Just kind of route the wires so that they look good. You can grab your tool and kind of stuff them into place. Once the rest of the drone is built, you're not going to see it too much. So it's not super important, but I just like everything to be very neat. And only you could tape down the wires here. You could tape over the connector. I'm going to go with over the connector. Nice, that looks so sweet, so sweet. Let's do it for the other four. All right, all the motors are installed. Let's grab our flight controller. The brain of the drone, this controls everything. This sends signals to the ESCs to spin the motors. This powers your DJI air unit. This has gyroscopes in here to make it so that the drone can stabilize itself. This is the real technology in the drone. Grab four more of those spacers and drop them onto the screws. So again, check your orientation. So we've got our front of the drone and the ESC board is installed so that the battery connector is coming out the right side. Our flight controller is going to drop onto the same four screws with the arrow facing forward. There's an arrow right on the flight controller. Just point that forward and slide her on. Oh yeah, that's satisfying. Now we're going to connect our flight controller board to the ESC board. We've got a whole bunch of different connectors. Find the one that looks like this and is labeled FC Flight Controller and ESC. We're going to plug the FC connector into the front connector of the flight controller. So now we're going to wrap our cable over here and it's going to plug into the side of the ESC. Something you can do to keep things tidied up is lift your flight controller up and put the wires kind of on the inside, route them all clean like. So now we're going to install our air unit. This unit is responsible for being the camera and sending the image from that camera to the goggles that you're wearing so you can fly a first-person view. We've got our camera which is going to go up front and the box part of the air unit which the antennas are going to plug into and that's going to go in the rear. Let's grab that 3M double-sided sticky tape. Get the stuff that says VHB that stands for very high bond. This stuff is really good. So this is pressure activated so you put it down. It's pressure activated so don't push too hard on it until you're ready to stick both sides. Before we stick it down let's install our antennas. The antennas go in this nifty antenna holder. So you're just going to insert the connector side through this 3D printed portion. You want to orientate the connector like so. Just spin the antenna around until the connector is pointed the right way and then push it into place. This is how it should look when it's all done. Now grab two standoffs from your frame hardware kit and install them like that. Now you've also got these little sleeve pieces that are going to install onto the standoff. The two antennas are going to plug into the back of the air unit. Just push hard. You hear that click? That's what you want to hear. Now when we get it all installed it's going to get a little tight there so it's a good idea to grab the harness that's going to connect to the air unit to the flight controller. Thread the flight controller side through. So the flight controller side is the smaller six pin connector and on the side that goes into the air unit it's a bigger eight pin connector but there's still only six wires. Just plug that in. There's a really nice satisfying click. So now let's go ahead and peel that tape. Grab two of our screws. Length doesn't really matter what you've got left over. I believe this is eight mil. These six mil screws will work fine but I like using the longer ones. Eight mil. Loosely thread it into the bottom of the standoff. I'm going to push the air unit back so that the connectors are up against the standoffs. Make sure we're happy with how it's centered, angled, everything. I'm getting it just right. Then we are going to double check that this wire has slack. Wires aren't getting pinched. It's not crooked. Now we're going to push down on that pressure-activated tape and just hold it for 30 seconds or so. So our camera is going to mount up front and you can just run this cable on top of the fly controller. Or again, if you want to make it look nice, just kind of lift the fly controller up. Tuck the wire between the two boards. Push it back down. I've got our camera mounts here. I'm going to go on to some standoffs again. So now on one side of the camera mount pieces, there's a recess for the head of the screw to sit into and that's going to go on the outside of the drone. The left side is going to be on the side of the camera and going on to the inside of the drone. See, it's looking good. That's how it should look. Now look at the camera. On the back there's an arrow. The arrow should point up to the sky because that's where you fly. All right, now find the screws for the camera. They may be in the Air Unit packaging or they may be included separately and you might get four of them because there might be two screw holes on each side of the camera or you might just get two for one screw hole on each side of the camera. Either way, they are just these little screws and to fasten them, you're going to need your 1.5mm hex driver. So we're going to line up the camera holes along with the holes in the camera mount. We're going to grab our little baby screws and our 1.5mm hex driver. Put that on there and screw it into the camera. The last plug we have to do is plugging the Air Unit box into the flight controller. Here we go, looking great. Hooray, hooray. Flatten these wires against the box of the Air Unit. I want to have some slack to the flight controller. We're just going to wrap tape around it and that's going to help hold the box down as well as keep the wires tidy. As you're wrapping it, make sure not to cover the SD card slot or the USB port. It's looking pretty good. Now we're going to do one last look at how all our wires are sitting. Push them in wherever they might be sticking out. Make sure there's free play, like this wire for the camera. Make sure it's not hung up. It should feel like you can move it around freely. Once you're satisfied with all of your wire routing, you can secure the stack with your M3 nuts. Just thread these on. For these, you take your 2mm hex driver, hold the screw from the bottom, take your 5.5 box wrench, and just run the nuts down. You don't want to crank these down because you've got these gummies, and if you over torque it, then you've defeated the purpose, right? You just want to snug it up against the gummy, about like that. The gummy is just compressing a little bit, but you haven't totally pancaked it. Guys, this is looking really good. Really, really good. We've got two standoffs left that are going to go up front here. We've got some standoffs in between the front where the camera is and this lower stiffener. I think it's looking pretty good. Your top plate is going to go on here. This cutout is going to fit around the antennas, and you're going to bolt this top plate down to the six standoffs. One, two, three, four, five, six. Grab whatever screws you have left. Again, just do all six loosely. Now we're going to torque down the top plate screws all the way. Super snug. Now we're going to run around the whole drone and double check every single screw. Make sure they're all super tight. The standoff screws, the arm screws, the motor screws, every screw. Take the time. Double check it. Get this nice looking battery pad. Get your logo facing the right way. Peel the sticker back. Sit her down. The drone is fully assembled, just like that. Super easy. Anyone that's seen us build drones before knows the next step is to plug into the matrix and start hacking the flight controller and configuring the ESCs and getting everything set up and remapping the motors and going into the CLI and doing all sorts of crazy stuff. You don't have to with this. We've taken care of all of that for you. If you've got everything oriented correctly, your ESC is set up so that the pigtail is coming out the right side. Your flight controller is set so that the arrow is facing forward. You didn't force any of the connectors in the wrong way. You should be good to go. The flight controller is pre-configured. The ESC is pre-configured. This thing is ready to rip. The only thing that you are going to need to plug in is the air unit. You're going to need to activate this with DJI software. Update the firmware. If there's a new version out, whatever, there'll be a link in the description to your goggles. Let's grab our goggles and our controller and show you how to do that. Open up the program. Plug your air unit into your computer and power up the drone so that the air unit is powered. It might take a second, but once your computer recognizes the device, you should be prompted to log in or create an account with DJI if you don't already have one. Once you're finally logged in, you can activate your air unit. Once it's activated, it may also prompt you to update it, which is a good idea to do while you're in there. It's really important to activate and update everything. If you don't, you might still be able to get them linked up and get video, but you could have some real performance issues, reduced range, dropouts, all sorts of things that could lead to a really bad time, so definitely activate and update your DJI gear. Go ahead and click through, and this part might take a little bit to actually complete the download and the update. Once you get it going, maybe go make some coffee or something, because it might be sitting there for a while. Just don't leave it for too long because your air unit is going to get really, really hot. Then once you've finally completed updating your air unit, you get to do the exact same thing all over again with your radio and your goggles. So plug your goggles into the computer, and then using the same program, you can update it, and then plug your radio into the computer, and again using the same program, you can update it. The process is exactly the same for the goggles, the radio and the air unit. Now that everything is activated and updated, you can bind all your components. So that means you need to get your air unit actually connected to your goggles and your radio. So get everything powered up and you actually need to link your goggles before your radio. So to start with the goggles, look for this little red recess button under the power port and click it with something small, and the goggles should start beeping. Then go over to the drone and find an even smaller recess button underneath the SD card slot. To get at it, a SIM card tool is perfect, but you could also use a small pair of tweezers. Once you click that, the goggles and the air unit should connect and the goggles will stop beeping. Now you can move over to the radio, which is a little bit trickier because you need to hit three buttons at the same time. You need to push in the wheel on the upper right shoulder. You need to push this button on the front, and you need to push the record button on the upper left shoulder. Click all three buttons at once and the radio will start beeping. So now go back to the air unit and hit that same small button under the SD card slot. So if everything is looking good with the goggles, we're going to go ahead and test arm the quad. Now make sure the props are off. Have the props off. Don't ever arm your quad for the first time with the props on. Take your props off. Now grab your radio and make sure all of the switches are pushed away from you. This is the default position for all the switches. And to arm your quad, just flip the arm switch, which is labeled SA, the A switch, and just flip it all the way up. Now since the props are off, you might hear the motors start to spool up a little bit. That's totally fine. Just disarm your quad if they start to get too high. But something else that you can double check here to make sure everything's looking good with the build, you can touch the motors and make sure they're spinning the right direction. The two front motors should be spinning inward toward the nose and the rear two motors should be spinning inwards toward the tail. Just touch it lightly with your finger and make sure it feels like it's spinning the right way. And now you're good to go. Everything should be ready to fly. I'm pretty excited. I have never built a drone before and just not plugged the flight controller into a computer at all whatsoever. Just put it together. And we're just going to fly it. It's kind of weird for me. So we've got our props installed on the drone. Remember, the motors are spinning inward. So this is the orientation that the prop should be. If you're a little bit newer to this, you might not be able to immediately tell the difference. But if you look closely, there is a shape to the prop. This is the front of the prop and this is the rear of the prop. So the prop spins like this. Just take a screenshot of this image or whatever to help you make sure you get the props all on in the right spot. We've also installed an action camera mount up front. We've got these tuned to fly very well with the weight of an action camera up front. So I'm going to be using a GoPro Hero 9 but you can use really any GoPro or an Insta360 or a DJI camera. We've come to this empty parking lot which is going to be a great place to fly because there's nobody here. If you're newer, you might not want to fly over concrete because it can be less forgiving. So maybe find yourself a similar area but over grass. Now, this is your first or one of your first drones. You're not 100% familiar with how it's all supposed to work. We're going to pop up a program of how you've assigned all the switches on the radio and what all the functions are. You should be really familiar with that before you actually go to pilot your drone. And if you really have never even flown before, we'll leave a link in the description to a clip with some tips on some things to try and practice before you go full FPV freestyle, doing some line of sight test hovers, practicing in the simulator, other things like that. But in this video we're going to assume that you know a little bit on how to actually fly and we're going to get this thing up. The one thing I am going to show you before we actually fly and this is something that you should do anytime you've completed a new build or really completed any repair made any mechanical or programming change to the drone. This is a really good way to test things out. We've got a drone plugged in. We've got our radio turned on and for the first time we're actually going to arm our quad with the props on. Look at that. It all spins up but we aren't going to take off. We actually aren't going to add any throttle. We're going to hold the throttle down and we're just going to gently with the cyclic stick it. All right, let her back down. Okay. And now we're going to push it sideways and we should see the side go up the same way that we push it. That's left. That's right. And so what we did right there is we safely and in a very controlled way did one last test on the drone to make sure everything is working the way it should and it is. The drone did exactly what it's supposed to do if one of the props is in the wrong place or somehow we had messed up one of the orientation of the board to plug the problem. The drone wouldn't have behaved like that. It wouldn't have behaved properly. And we would know there was an issue before we actually added any throttle and had any altitude at all. So we have tested and double checked everything that we possibly can. It's finally time to fly this thing. We put this whole thing together with very basic tools just assemble the frame put the components on plugged everything in and it was ready to go. No soldering no plugging into a computer to configure or tune or any of that complicated stuff. This was super easy to put together. We're confident anyone is going to be able to do it. FPV is one of the most amazing hobbies you can get into. It is so rewarding. We know it can be really scary especially when you're thinking about doing your own building and all the complicated stuff that comes together to get into building and flying your own FPV drone. So if you want to pick up one of these check out our store Rotoride.com We know you're going to have a good time. Guys, I'm LaDrib and I'll see you next time on Rotoride.