 When I say FPV drone, what do you think of? Maybe you think of a very nimble acrobatic drone that can do crazy tricks, or maybe you think about a drone that has ducks around the props that's meant for flying indoors, for getting really smooth, cinematic proximity flights. What if I told you you were thinking of the same drone? Guys, I'm LaDriv, welcome to Roderite, and today we are building this skylight, my new signature three inch class frame. It can be set up to run open prop, to do crazy freestyle in a smaller package. And you can also hook up the same frame with ducks to make it a whoop style drone that can be flown indoors, do all sorts of proximity, smooth, silky, cinematic flights. One drone that can do everything. Today I'm gonna be walking you guys through putting together a skylight drone. So let's get started. These are all the parts you need. This is the drone here. You got your frame, got a 20 by 20 stack. You've got some motors, you know, really any 1507 size motor will work. We've got the Brother Hobby 3100KV. We've got a Caddx Vista, just some other odds and ends that I'll show you. And that's everything you need. This is going to become a full drone. We've got all the tools we need, just some drivers, some tweezers, some snippy-dos, good old soldering iron, contained in your Roderite branded tool pouch, available at the Roderite store, which you can find at Roderite.com. You don't need this stuff because you can't buy happiness. But I'm just saying, I am happier when I'm flying drones. So let's get started by putting together the frame kit. So this is everything that comes in the frame kit. You got your main plate, you got four arms, your top plate, camera cage, a little lower stiffener. These two duct mount pieces, I'll show you how that goes on, and all your hardware. So just M3 screws and 20 millimeter long M3 standoffs. First thing we are going to do is assemble the arms to the main plate with the lower stiffener piece. So over in your pile of hardware, sort through the screws that came with the frame kit, and you'll find that almost all of them are eight millimeter long, but there are five that are nine millimeter long. So find those five slightly longer M3 screws. Get out of here, short one. So what you're going to do is you're going to have the screw go up through the lower stiffener, through the arms, and then thread into the press nuts in the main plate. The press nuts are going to be on the inside of the drone. So the thread should go into kind of this bare side of the carbon. So this is the order that it's going to go together in. I definitely recommend using Loctite. So just take a little scrap piece of plastic. I hate Loctite, but it really is such a good idea. See, it's already, it's already all my hands. It's gross. It gets everywhere. It's a mess, but it's such a good idea to use. You don't want your screws falling out. Grab your main plate and grab an arm, and you can see how they fit together, right? This larger size hole goes over the hole without a press nut, and that's for your stack later on. And then this hole and this partial hole line up with the press nut holes. And so all four arms are going to share one screw in the middle, and then they also have a screw of their own. So it's always hardest getting just the first arm started, then it gets a lot easier. So just line it up, put your stiffener on it, dip your screw in Loctite. Now we're going to get our two millimeter driver. We're just going to thread that in. Don't thread it all the way in just yet to make getting in the rest of the arms easier. So just line this one up, dip it. It's okay if they're flopping around for now. Just want to get them started. Once you've got two in place using the outer screws, go ahead and put the middle screw in place and just loose. That's going to stop them from flopping around. Now you can put in the last two arms. Okay, with all the screws loosely in place, just double check everything. Make sure the arms aren't binding up. You should see everything lining up on the sides there. Once you're confident the arms are all lined up, go ahead and crank them all down. I like to start in the center. Get that pretty tight. And then just work around the outside ones. Snug them all up. Kind of doing it like a, like the wheel in a car. And now I'm going to go back again and really torque them down just, yeah. Exactly one half aga-daga. Ooh, yeah, that's tight. Look at that, nice and stiff. So now you may have seen a lot of the other three inch size drones have a single plate where the arms and the main plate are all one piece and if you're building one like that, then you get to skip that step of having to assemble the arms. But I designed this to have individual arms for a couple of reasons. One that you're probably going to crash at some point. And if you do break an arm on a mono plate, then you have to rebuild the whole drone. With this, you can swap out one of the arms very easily. It's only loosening up a couple of screws, slide out the old one, slide in the new one. And also having individual arms allowed me to optimize the layout of the carbon fiber weave. So a twill carbon fiber is strongest in one direction. So we were able to orient the fibers lengthwise along the arms just like we do on our five inch drones to make the frame very stiff. So yeah, it's a little extra work to have to assemble the arms like this, but it improves the rigidity, which gives you better tuneability, makes it more repairable. So all around, I'm really happy with this. So with the main plate and the arms assembled, we are gonna set the rest of our frame bits aside and we're gonna start putting the components onto this assembly. You could continue to assemble the frame, but not having to stand off to the camera cage in place is gonna make putting the components on a little bit easier. You got more room to work with. We're gonna start with the center of our drone, the stack. We're using the T-Motor 20 by 20 stack, but really you can fit any 20 by 20 stack. You're gonna wanna have something that mounts with M3 hardware, because it's M3 holes in the center. Now you'll notice that the mounting holes on the boards are actually quite a bit larger than M3 hardware. And that's because you are to use these little soft mount gummies and install them in the hole. So that's gonna step the hole down from a four millimeter diameter to a three millimeter diameter. And it's gonna provide you the benefit of soft mounting your electronics, which is going to isolate the flight controller from vibrations and also provide some cushioning for both the flight controller and the AC in the event of a crash. And you'll notice that there's two sizes. Just make sure to use this same type on the same board. So I guess we'll hook it up on the ESC. We'll use the shorter one. It's always kind of a pain in the butt. You can carefully use tweezers to help guide it through. I'm gonna go ahead and get these installed on the flight controller as well. So on the flight controller I'm using the taller ones, and I'm gonna put the thicker side on the bottom of the flight controller. So we just insert the thinner side up from the bottom. Both our boards are prepped for installation, and we are gonna start by installing the ESC onto the airframe. We're gonna set it up with the capacitor going out to one of the sides. We'll probably put it out to the right side of the drone like so. The T-motor was really nice to include some long hardware to mount your stack. However, if you look at the standoffs we're gonna be using, it's significantly longer. So you're gonna need some shorter screws since we're using 20 millimeter standoffs and the bottom plate will take out some of the length. We can use 20 millimeter long screws and it should work out with a little clearance to the top plate. So you get some M3 20 millimeter screws for installing your stack. So the reason for the larger sized hole on the stiffener plate and the arms is that the head can drop through and the head of the screw can mate up against the main plate like that. Now since we are trying to keep these stack pretty tight rather than using these little spacers that is included with the stack, we're gonna use some smaller M3 nylon nuts. Just thread that onto your long screw and tighten it all the way down. So just repeat with three more 20 millimeter screws and nylon nuts. Okay, now with your stack screws installed you can drop your ESC on. We're gonna have the power leads and capacitor come out on the right side of the drone. So just line it up, drop it down, drop it downtown. So this is the front of the drone. Camera cage is gonna go up here. It's the rear of the drone. Your antenna's gonna stick out the back. This is the left side of the drone. The right side of the drone. Motor's going there. So with your ESC installed, just double check that the screws holding the arms on aren't making contact with the bottom of the ESC. The nylon nuts should provide enough spacing but it never hurts to take a really close look and make sure that you have clearance. So if there are touching, your ESC is gonna short out. It's gonna catch on fire and you're gonna have a bad time. Grab a motor. We're using a 1507-3100KV. Now your motor screws are smaller M2 size screws. So for that you are going to need your 1.5 millimeter driver. Just dip it in a little Loctite. Thread it in loosely. You got four motor screws per motor and we've got four motors. So can you tell me how many motor screws there are total? That's right. 16. Siete. Is it Siete? Hey, how do you say 16 in Spanish? What is it? DSA says? Yeah, that's close. DSA says. I don't know Spanish. I know a little French, but that's not gonna help here. And with all four screws loosely installed, just work your way around just like before, snug them up and then torque them down. So with the motor mounted up, we're gonna run our motors where we want them to be. I just like to kind of put the motor in the groove of the ESC like that. Drupal check, you like how the wires are running? Because once you cut length off, it's kind of a pain to add length back. Where's our cutter boys? Oh yeah, in the rotor right at tool pouch. Just cut them a little bit above where they're sitting, just like that. Boop. Now we can strip off the ends of the motor wires. We've got a rotor right branded lipo battery hooked up to our soldering iron cable, powered up, get this thing up to temperature. You probably need like 360, 370 degrees Celsius. I usually just turn it up all the way and go 400. Keep a clean tip, pre tin your soldering iron with some solder. So what we're doing is I'm holding heat on the pad of the ESC and then I'm flowing solder onto it. Should look like that, nice shiny bubble. Do that for all four. Just hold the tip of the iron on the pad, flow on some solder. And while we're here, let's just go ahead and do all the rest of the pads. Now we're gonna pre tin the motor wires. So just pull them away from the ESC so you don't drop any solder on there. And here's a tip, if you're really nervous about a blob of solder dropping on your expensive ESC and ruining it, grab some electrical tape, drape it on top of the ESC, cover it up. Anytime you're gonna be soldering and the area that you're soldering on could end up like above a sensitive electronic, it's a good idea to cover it up or really just try to push the wires away from it so that you're not above it. You really just don't want any solder dropping down and landing on your expensive component because that could short something out and ruin it. And we're gonna pre tin our wires. This is the same deal where we just apply some heat to the end of the wire here and add in some solder. Boom. Now we're gonna move our tape out of the way for a moment and we are going to flow the solder on the end of the wire into the solder on the pad. It helps to get some tweezers. And I like to work kind of in this direction so that as I'm holding the wire with the tweezers I don't have the wires that I've previously soldered getting in my way. So we're gonna grab the wire that's toward the middle of the drone first and solder it to the pad that's toward the outside of the drone. So just hold the wire over the pad and apply some heat. The solder should flow together. Remove your iron. Hold it for another second and you're good. The middle wire goes to the middle pad. Now grab your wireless toward the front or the rear of the drone. And that should go toward the inner pad. Look how beautiful that is. Now we're just gonna push our motor wires down onto the arm. Make sure everything routes nice and cleanly. Oh, come on, that's gorgeous. That is gorgeous. Now when you set this up with ducts you'll see that the ducts will help hold the wires down onto the arm. But if you are gonna fly this with unshrouded props it's a good idea to do something to hold the wires down onto the arm. Just gonna use a little bit of electrical tape. So again, double check your screw clearances. You do not want the screws touching the bottom of the windings. So everything should line up. But it never hurts to check again that you've got good clearance. So that's looking good to me. If the bottom of your screws touch your windings you're gonna short out your motor and your drone's gonna fall out of the sky. You're gonna have a bad time. This is looking really good. And it was really fun too. You know what's great? We get to do it three more times. This is looking great. We've got all four motors installed, soldered up to the ESC, taped down. The routing is super clean. Definitely pay attention on the rear here to leave enough space for your Vista. You don't want the wires hanging out all back here. So just keep them kind of tucked up. We should be good to go. We've still got one more thing to solder and that is the power lead here. Just line it up with the red on the positive pad and the black on the negative pad. And I like to have my lead kind of bend to the back there. It doesn't have to be exact. If you're nervous leave a little extra length. But I like to do that so that, you know, the leads end up different lengths so that it more naturally bends to the back. You don't have to do that, but just something I like to do. Now we're gonna strip it. You should really use wire strippers, not your cutter tools. Different tools through different jobs. Don't be a primitive Pete. Now this particular board does come with a capacitor installed. If you're using a different board, you can install a capacitor yourself. I definitely recommend running them. It just helps prevent voltage spikes from doing any damage and generally makes the quad easier to tune. Like I said, this one comes with a capacitor installed, but the build team did ask me to remove this capacitor and install a larger one. So if you're only gonna be flying for us, this small capacitor is totally fine. And honestly, I'm only gonna be flying for us. So I would probably just leave it. But since they wanted me to show you how we do it on the builds that we do here so that they're safe with 6S, I'm gonna go ahead and take this capacitor off and install this larger one. So we've got just enough space in there to squeeze in our cutters and just snip the leads. One, two, there we go. All right, so with the original capacitor cut off, we're gonna solder our lead on and then we're gonna solder the new capacitor in place. So now soldering the power leads onto the main pads is just like doing the motor wires just bigger. So if you haven't already turned your soldering iron all the way up, crank it up now. Just hold the iron onto the pad. It's gonna take a little bit longer because it's a much larger pad. Start adding solder, hold it, okay. The pads are pre-tinned. Now we're gonna pre-tin our wires. Just trying to get the solder to flow cleanly through all the strands of the wire. On these bigger wires, it might be a good idea to even flip them over, hit it from the other side. Yeah, you see, I only really had solder on one side there. Just looking to make sure there's no bare spots, no exposed strands. It's looking good. So same deal, we've got the pads pre-tinned with solder. We've got the wires pre-tinned with solder. We're just gonna hold the wire against the pad and apply heat so it all flows together. Might help to add a little solder if you're having trouble flowing it. Just add a little extra to get it going. Then when you remove the heat, hold the wire in place for a second longer to make sure it cools down. You can blow on it to help. Some people say don't do that because it cools the solder too quickly or there's moisture in your breath or whatever, but I call baloney, it's fine. What you don't want is you don't want it to look like that. So this is a cold joint where and the solder has started to flow, but you really can see the wires are sitting on top of the pad. You want it to look like this, where it's all flowed together nice and pretty. So this needs higher heat or more time. Okay, it'll look for anything like that. So on the bottom of the positive pad there, I've got this little blob of solder. So I'm just going to go in there with my iron and kind of scoop that up out of the way. That's just to clean it up. It wasn't really causing any problems. You just want to make sure that you don't have such a blob of solder that it's going to make contact with the carbon or anything like that. So double check your clearance, okay. Now we are going to add our big boy capacitor. So there's a couple of ways to route the leads, but the most important thing is to make sure you get the polarity right. So the side with the stripe is going to go on the negative pad. Now this particular capacitor actually has a negative symbol to make sure that it's super clear, but not all capacitors have that. So if yours doesn't just remember the stripe goes with the negative. Another way you can tell is it is the shorter lead. So the short lead is going on the negative side and this longer lead is going on the positive side. So I'm going to insert the leads between the two wires and kind of bend them on top there. We're just going to flow a little solder. Okay, so with that soldered, we can trim off the excess lengths of the leads there. Click, click, okay. Now we can bend our capacitor up. We've got our capacitor installed to make it a little more durable. I'm going to use this piece of wide heat shrink around the wires and the capacitor. I don't know exactly what size this is, but it's about the width of my thumb. So even this can't quite fit over the lead there. So I'm just going to grab two of my drivers. I'm going to stretch it out a little bit. So now it's about almost 30 millimeters wide. So stretch it out or just buy the right stuff in the first place. Grab your heat gun and burn your quad. So we've got all of our main soldering done. Now's actually a good time to test your work. So we're going to plug a battery in and make sure that we get motor beeps. You should use a smoke stopper, which plugs in between your battery and your drone. And if there's a problem, it prevents the current from flowing too high and prevents anything from burning out. I don't want to go back downstairs. Just going to look for one. We're just going to one, two, three. We're good to go. You're not going to get your second set of tones because the flight controller is not plugged in. We just want to make sure that the smoke stopper doesn't go out or in my case, the magic smoke doesn't come out and that the motor beep as they should. So we're good to go. It's not time to grab your flight controller. We've already got our gummies installed with the thicker side on the bottom. And we're just going to drop it straight on top of the ESC, trying to keep it nice and tight. We could put a spacer in there, but we're trying to keep it real tight because we've got those short standoffs. So we're just going to go gummy to gummy and install the flight controller right on top. Yeah, there's plenty of space in there. Again, we're just double checking all our clearances. We don't want the screws for the arms touching the bottom of the ESC. We don't want any components of the ESC touching components on the flight controller. Just giving it a really close look, but we've got tons of space in there. You want to orient the flight controller so that the arrow is facing the front of the drone. Another way to double check is that the USB port is on the opposite side of the power lead. Along with our stack, we've got a couple wire harnesses. We've got this one that's going to connect our flight controller to our ESC foreign one. Double check to see if they are different connectors or anything. Some stacks have different connectors or wire orders for the two boards. This one is identical on both sides, you can see, so it doesn't matter which plug goes into which. Plug it into the ESC. It only goes in one way, so don't force it, but it does take a little bit of pressure to get it in there, just nothing crazy. Boop, should look like that. You can see the order of the wire colors. Okay, then grab the other end. If you want to clean it up, you can kind of twist it together, that kind of makes it look nice. We're going to bring it around front and plug it into your flight controller. Boom, looking good. Now we do another double check. Now unless there's some really horrible flash on there from the factory, it should be set up enough to at least initialize the ESC, so plug her in. All right, no smoke. The smoke stopper I'm supposed to be using didn't trip. We got all the beeps, things are looking good. Grab your Caddx Vista. This is the most expensive part of the build. Ooh. For this particular build, I'm using the Vista with the Nebula Pro camera. You can actually fit the full-size camera up in the camera cage. It's got the mounting holes for both versions of cameras. It will fit, but using the smaller Nebula camera keeps things a little bit more lightweight and keeps things from being, you know, kind of too tight, easier to work on. So your Vista is going to mount back here. We've got 20 by 20 mounting holes here and the camera will be up front. So grab some long M2 screws. I believe these are 18 millimeters. You need them to be shorter than our standoffs. So thread these 18 millimeter long M2 screws through the M2 20 by 20 holes in the rear. It's looking good. And then drop your Vista onto that. All right, oh yeah, that's perfect. Just enough thread for a nut. You don't need to put the nuts on just yet. We just need to have the Vista in place so that we can measure the length of our Vista connector. So also included with the T-Motor stack is another harness that's got a plug for the fly controller on one side and a plug that would go to the full-size air unit. We are not using a full-size air unit. So we're going to lop this plug off and we're going to solder these wires to the Vista. So for connecting the Vista, you want to make sure to use the cable that comes with the T-Motor stack. On the left here, we have the cable that comes with the Vista itself and on the right is the cable that comes with the stack. And if you look closely at the connector that goes into the fly controller stack, you'll see that the wiring is exactly backwards. So if you use the wrong one, the Vista may not work or you might even damage it. The cable that comes with the stack is meant for the full-size air unit as it has an air unit cable in the back. And we're going to cut that off. You want the cable to be as long as possible so that you have all the slack you can have for routing the wires. So take your snippers and just cut off the connector as close to it as you can get. We're going to pre-tin the wires, pre-tin the pads just like before. These are very small wires, very small pads, so turn down your soldering iron a bit. You want just enough to flow the solder, but not too much that it makes a mess. Drip them. So now if you're up to it, just solder to the sides of the pads there, but on the other side, you've got bigger pads. So I'm actually going to go ahead and remove the Vista for soldering. Let me just flip it over. Got labels, you've got V for input voltage, that's your red wire. Next one over is G for ground, that's going to be your black wire. The next pad is your RX, that's going to be a white wire. Then you've got your TX pad, it's going to be a gray wire. Then you've got another ground pad, that's going to be brown. Then the last pad says SBUS, that's going to be yellow. This is how it should be looking when you're done. So now we can drop the Vista back on to our screws in the rear. And this time we can go ahead and tighten them down. We're just going to use little M2 nylon nuts. Now I don't actually have the right size box wrench for the M2 nuts. That's okay, they're so small, you can really just use a pair of tweezers, just hold the nut with the tweezers, and then use your 1.5 millimeter hex driver to tighten them down. Don't need to go too crazy. Just like a, oh, looking good, looking good. It's just long enough, okay. Before we plug it in, let's get our antenna in place. So we got to slide our cover out of the way. You might need to loosen up this screw and this nut a little bit to get it to slide out easily. No, yep, there we go, slides right out. Caddx gives you an antenna, boop. These are UF.L connectors. Be careful to get it lined up, set it on the pad, and it'll just plug right in there. There you go. Now you can take this, lift it up and over. Little pin you got to get it under. That's gonna prevent your antenna from getting ripped out. Now you can tighten these screws back up. All right, everything's looking good, looking good. Let's take our connector, bring it up to the flight controller. Looking good. So let's mount our camera up. I'm gonna run the camera wire between the flight controller and the ESC just to help things clean up. So I'm gonna unplug the ESC connector there. Just lift the board up a bit, get the wire running through, drop it back down, re-plug it in. Now let's get our camera plates from our frame kit. Grab some of the eight millimeter M3 screws. Put them in the lock tight. We've got three three millimeter screw holes. Put the screw through, attach a standoff. Do that with all three screw holes with the standoffs coming off on one side. Doesn't matter which side, we'll just match it up later. Okay, looking good. Now grab some of the camera screws that came with the Vista. Gonna find the right length here. Since we're using the Nebula, we're going to use the center camera mount hole, not the swoops. So we're just gonna see if this is a good length, put the screw through. It looks like it should be right. So grab your camera plate and your camera, and we are going to install it so that the wire is coming out on the top of the camera. So this is the top with this tab up here. Should look like this. So basically with this particular camera, you're actually installing it upside down. Other cameras naturally have the wire on top, but this one is meant to be installed the other way, but it's really not a big deal. We can flip it in the goggles later. So just install it loosely, so that'll help us line things up later. This is how we should be looking. You're gonna install this camera plate so that this slot fits over this tab. With these standoffs going toward the inside of the frame. Now grab your other camera plate and line it up here. Okay, now you're gonna use another M2 screw in here to attach the camera and then three more M3 screws to attach the standoffs. So I'm gonna do the camera first. Okay, don't tighten it up too much yet. Keep it loose so that you can line up the M3 screws. Tighten all the M3 screws down. Go back and hit both sides. So like a half Uggaduga. Uggaduga, and there you go. The camera's still loose in there. So if you know your angle, you can set it and tighten down the camera screws. On the camera screws, these are small screws so you really don't wanna tighten them down too much. And I like to leave them loose enough that I can quickly crank the camera into a different angle if I wanna adjust it out in the field for some reason. So like tight enough that when you bump into something it doesn't move on you, but not so tight that you can't adjust it or that you damage it from cranking those little screws down too much. So everything should be set up. Just triple check everything that you don't have any screws touching electronics, that none of your wires are pinched or pulled too tight or anything like that. And we can go ahead and button up the stack. I'm just gonna grab some M3 nuts and we've got just enough threads sticking out of the top of the flight controller gummies to thread some nuts on. I actually just prefer to use nylon nuts up top but we'll go ahead and use the metal nyloc nuts that are included with the stack. You don't wanna tighten them down too much. You don't wanna squeeze the gummies and damage them and basically defeat the whole point of the soft mounting. You wanna just snug them up. So hold the stack screw with your two millimeter driver then grab your 5.5 millimeter box wrench, snug them up, just feel a little bit resistance. Yep, that's good. You wanna feel just a touch of pressure on the gummy without squeezing it too much. So it's a feeling thing but ultimately it should look like that with just a little compression on the gummies but nothing crazy. It shouldn't be loose but it shouldn't be too tight either. So now we can put the top plate on. We've got a few more standoffs to install. Grab some eight millimeter screws to go with them. We'll start up front. We've got two screw holes just behind the camera. Drop a screw in there. Thread your standoff into it. Really just thread them in finger tight so that it's easier to line up your top plate. Now we'll do our back ones the same as before. Just insert the screw up into the screw hole and put the standoff on finger tight. So now typically I like to use a 3D printed mount that goes on the back standoffs to hold my antenna and we do have those available for the skylight if that's what you wanna do but I actually like to just zip tie the antenna to the top plate. We've got these two slots right here that are gonna work perfectly for this sheathed section of the antenna. So grab your zip tie, insert it through the slot, route it around the antenna, back into the other slot. Okay, not gonna really crank it down yet. Let's get it arranged. So now we're gonna set the top plate down onto the frame. Make sure your camera wire doesn't get pinched so just tuck it in there. Wanna have your antenna routed like that. Maybe pull it out a little bit. And when you set it on top, these two features are gonna go into the two slots here. So just set her down. It all lines up nicely. Hold it down with one finger. Grab some more eight millimeter M3 screws, put them in place, tighten them down. So we can pull our antenna out to the length we want. Just really crank down on that zip tie. I like to even use the cutters to just kinda grip it, pull it, and then trim it. Look at that, look at that, looking so good. All right, now's a great time to go around your drone and double check all the screw tightnesses. Really make sure they're torqued down. All right, the drone is built. Now you'll notice there are a couple carbon pieces left over and these are used for mounting the ducts if you want to use them, but you don't have to. This fly is great without ducts. You can use three or even up to three and a half inch props and I mean it really rips like a freestyle quad. It's a ton of fun. I'm gonna show you how to put the ducts on, but the ducts do get in the way of the USB port. So before we do that, let's plug the fly controller in and get it all configured and plug the Vista in and get it activated and updated. So to get everything set up, configured and updated on your drone, you're going to need a computer as well as two cables. You need a micro USB cable as well as a USB-C cable. Let's start by activating and updating your Caddx Vista. So you're gonna need the USB-C cable, plug it into your computer and into the Vista itself. Now open up the DJI Assistant 2 DJI FPV Series Program from DJI. We'll leave a link in the description to the correct program. And once the program is booted up, plug a battery into the drone so that power is applied to the Vista. And now just wait for the program to recognize the Vista that you have connected. It might take a minute or two. Once you're in there, just click on the unit, hit start activation, confirm your account and wait for activation. Once you're activated, you may also be prompted to update it, but it looks like this one is on the latest version so we are good to go. You can go ahead and unplug the drone and shut down the DJI program. Now we're gonna move on to Betaflight so grab the USB micro cable, plug the cable into the USB port on the flight controller, then plug the other end into your computer and open up Betaflight. Again, we'll have a link in the description to the latest version of Betaflight. You wanna be using a configurator version 10.8 or higher because that's gonna make some of the ESC settings a lot easier. So let's just connect to the board. We don't need to have the battery plugged in for this whole process. So we just click up here on connect and we are in and we have a model of the drone right here and we can use this to double check that our board orientation is correct. If I lift up the tail, I should see the nose dip, lift up the nose, right, left, turn it around. Yep, looks good. But before we go on and actually start configuring things, let's see what version of firmware we are actually on and it looks like we're on 4.1.7. We do wanna use 4.3 or higher. So disconnect and go back in here and click on the firmware flasher option and we're gonna flash a new firmware to this board. Pick the right target for the board that you're using. In our case, we are using the T-Motor F7. So find that in here and find a version of 4.3. Pretty soon after this video comes out, there should be a fully public released version of 4.3. But at this point, we're gonna have to click on show unstable releases that we can access release candidates and that is gonna enable us to get a version of 4.3. In this case, release candidate three. We're gonna erase everything. So we're gonna start our configuration fresh, load firmware online and then just hit flash firmware. If you're on a Windows, you might need to manually put it in DFU mode or hit the bootloader button. But being on a Mac, it put us in DFU mode when we hit flash firmware. Now we can just hit flash firmware again and it'll do its thing. All right, programming successful. Unplug, replug. Come on, there we go. Hit connect. All right, so the first time you go into the configurator after flashing, it's gonna give you notice about custom defaults and yeah, that's fine. Go ahead and hit custom defaults. It's gonna give us a better starting point. All right, and now it's gonna give us a bunch of warnings and yeah, this is all stuff we're gonna fix. So don't worry about it, don't freak out. Double check, everything's looking good. If you notice that when the drone is sitting flat on the table, the model doesn't look perfectly flat or you can actually see on here that there's a 2.3 degree off axis on roll and 1.8 on pitch. You can go ahead and calibrate the accelerometer. It's never real bad eyes here to do that. Just click here and just don't touch the table. Be very still, click, wait. All right, and that brings our pitch and roll down to zero. We're looking good. Now we can start configuring. But now let's move on to the port section. So this port section is where we tell the flight controller what we've connected to it via the UARTs on the flight controller. The UARTs are input and output ports that allow you to connect different peripherals. In this case, we have the Caddox Vista connected to two different UARTs through that single plug. So for each UART, you can assign one function. So for UART 1, we've connected the serial Rx function. That's the S-Bus wire. So we just click here and then just make sure not to touch anything else in this row. And then UART 3, we are using for your MSP connection. So just check this and then don't touch anything else in this row. So UART 1 is going to allow the signal from our radio to the Vista to get into the flight controller so the drone can respond to your inputs. And UART 3 is going to handle the communication for rendering your on-screen display and in-goggled PID tuning and all that fun stuff. So unless you have chosen to use a different receiver connected to a different UART or some other peripheral like a GPS or something like that, we should be done after just clicking these two tabs. So just go down and hit Save and Reboot. Reconnect and make your way to the configuration section. The 8K gyro update frequency is fine, but we can actually bump up the PID frequency to 4K. You could go higher, but we don't really see too much of a benefit, so might as well leave it down there. We don't have neither a barometer nor magnetometer, how do we say that word on this board? So we can uncheck these things. We could leave it, but might as well uncheck it. Let's type in Skylight for craft name. This arming section, this is something you might want to change to 180 degrees, which is going to allow you to arm your drone no matter what angle it's at. So even if you crash upside down, you can still arm it. If you don't change it and the angle of your drone is greater than the angle set, it won't let you arm it, which could be seen as a safety feature, but we always find it's just more convenient to be able to arm no matter what, and you should just be a little more careful. As far as these other features, all these are fine. You don't need to turn on anything else. You just want to have on-screen display and air mode. In fact, some people prefer not to permanently enable air mode, so I will sometimes turn this off and then set up air mode to be activated via a switch, but we'll just leave it on here because that's how most people do it. Then back up here, we saw that the drone orientation matched the model and setup, so we don't need to change that. As long as you have the arrow on the flight controller facing forward, you don't need to touch that. And then we can turn on these items here so that we can use D-Shot to make the motors beep at our command instead of having to install a separate beeper. And that should be everything we need here. Again, save and reboot. Reconnect. You don't need to change anything in the power and battery. This preset section is a new feature of Betaflight that lets you use preset tunes and configurations. We might start uploading our tunes and configurations here, but for now we're just gonna walk you through it manually. In the Pid Tuning section is where you can set the Pids, the Rates, and the Filters. The Pids and the Filters are going to be set based on your drone build as well as your personal preference, and the Rates are also gonna be based on your personal preference. We're just gonna leave the Rates stock. These are fine rates. You might wanna raise them up or down depending on what you want out of your stick feel. And as far as Pids and Filters, you can copy the numbers we're showing here as a great starting point. These are the numbers that we use on all of the skylights that we build here. And then if we find that we need to do any more, we're finding on the tuning for each individual one, we'll tweak it. But most of the time we end up very close to these Pid values and filter settings. So in the Receiver section, we are going to tell the fly controller what language the Vista is going to speak to it for the radio control. And that is going to be a serial connection via the UART, which we set earlier. And the protocol for our serial connection is SBUS. For channel map, you can define the output of the radio. The DJI radio uses the FreeSky channel mapping. So just click here. That should give you A-E-T-R-1-2-3-4. Now's a good time to save and reboot. Go back into the Receiver section. And you should see it look a little bit different. So to check that we've set up the Receiver section correctly, let's grab a radio and bind it to the Vista. Just turn on your radio and plug in the drone. Wait for everything to initialize. Then just press the front button, this top roller and the record button to put the radio in bind mode. And then click the button on the side of the Vista. And we should be bound up. And now let's look at the screen and we should see that the bars have moved. Let's move the sticks and see that everything responds. Yep, this is looking good. When we move throttle up, the throttle bar goes up. When we move the yaw to the left, yaw moves to the left. Pitch up, pitch right, roll right, roll right. Everything is responding as we would expect. Now let's skip over the modes tab for a moment and go to motors. So this section is where we can figure out how the flight controller talks to the ESCs and controls the motors. And also in this newer version of the Betaflight Configurator and newer Betaflight firmware, we're also going to be able to do some of the ESC settings so that we don't have to go into a separate BL Heli Configurator, which is really cool. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna set up four props out simply by clicking this tab and you're gonna see that the arrows change up here. Now, on my five inch quads, I do like to run props in, which is the default setting. But on these smaller drones, I feel like you get a little bit more stable performance. I'm moving down here to ESC and motor features. There's first thing we gotta do, what it's been yelling at us about is set an ESC protocol. So let's go ahead and pick a D-Shot setting. If you wanna get really spicy, you can use D-Shot 600, which is gonna give you a really fast communication between your flight controller and your ESCs. But we really don't see much of a performance improvement between D-Shot 300 and 600. However, we do find that 300 tunes out a little bit smoother. So we, most of the time just stick with 300, but go ahead and do 600 if you really wanna try it. But I'm telling you, 300's probably fine. And now as far as features go, you don't wanna use motor stop. Otherwise, when you lower the throttle all the way, the motors will stop, which might cause you to lose a little bit of control. We are not using ESC telemetry over a separate wire, but we are gonna use bi-directional D-Shot. And you're gonna get this warning about changing the dynamic notch values. And that's okay, go ahead and hit agree. An important thing to check is the number of motor poles, which as they explained is the number of magnets on the motor bell. And you can count that. So if you wanna count the magnets on your motor, just flip one of the motors over. And what you can do is mark one of the magnets with a Sharpie and line it up with one of the tabs on the base here. And then just spin the bell around and as each magnet passes, count it. And when you get back to the marked one, you know how many magnets there are. And you can see on this motor, it is 14. So the default setting is fine here. And with all this set up, let's go ahead and hit save and reboot. Now we got all the chimes. It's talking, hooray. Back to motors, no warning this time, hooray. And let's spin up the motors. Now, if I haven't already said this, guys, anytime you're doing any configuration work, keep the props off your drone. This can be a very unsafe thing if you are messing with the configuration on your flight controller and you have props installed. So make sure they're off, especially when you're about to intentionally spin up the motors. So we're gonna check this box that confirms everything I just said. And now we're able to move these sliders. So if I move the master slider up, all four motors are going to spin up. Now I'm just gonna lightly touch them here and they're all spinning the same direction. And that's just because I soldered the three wires from each of the motors in order to the three pads on the ESC. But if you find that one of your motors is spinning the opposite direction, you may have crossed two of the motor wires. And that's actually an acceptable way to reverse the directions of the motors that we need to reverse. And as you can see here, we need to switch the directions of two of the motors so that the motors on the drone match the motors on our diagram. And the other thing we need to match are the motor outputs of the diagram. So if I spin up just motor one, we want this one to spin, but uh-oh, turns out this one is spinning. So what that means is the motor outputs are not correct and that's because we changed the orientation of the ESC from the default orientation because we wanted our connector to come out of the side. The ESC's default configuration would have this connector coming out in the back, which would interfere with our Vista unit. So on many freestyle builds like this, where you have components in the rear of the drone, it's pretty common to rotate the four-in-one ESC, which means that you're gonna have to reconfigure the motors. And it's actually easier than ever to do that. It's something you can do right here in Betaflight. Before you'd have to always use a separate BL Heli configurator program, but now you can actually do it right here in Betaflight. So if we uncheck this box, then we can go here and hit Reorder Motors. And again, confirming that whenever you're doing this stuff, props better be off. So yes, I got it, hit Start. And what it does here is it spins up with the motors. It's spinning up this one, so I just click here. Now it's spinning this one. So I'm gonna click over here. Now we're spinning down here. So click the corresponding one. And as one last check, this one is spinning. It's the last one we can click. Here we go. Save. It's rebooting. And oh my gosh, that was so easy. Anyone who's seen us do build videos before knows that remapping the motors historically has been a big pain in the butt. And now, I understand the risks. Yes, spin motor one. We're expecting this motor to spin. And indeed, this motor is spinning motor two. It's spinning motor three, ta-da. Motor four, that is just so, that is just so wonderful that that worked. But we still need to address the motor direction. And so there's another wizard for that. Let's click motor direction. I understand the risks. Wizard, here we've got our diagram showing this is what we want the motors to be doing. Let's start them up. And like I said, they're all spinning at the same direction. And that is clockwise. And based on our diagram, we want motors two and three to be spinning clockwise, but we want one and four to be counterclockwise. So let's click motors one. Now motor one is spinning counterclockwise. And let's click motor four. That's spinning counterclockwise. And now, boom, all our motor directions are correct. Stop motors, close. That is so awesome. Let's just check one more time, spin them up. Yep, we're good. So that's everything that covers what you need to do to get the drone to be able to fly. The rest of the ESC settings that are on the ESC are fine. It's gonna fly great, but if you really wanna squeeze out a little bit more performance, you can go into the BL Heli configurator and here are some more detailed ESC settings that you can set up using that configurator. So back in Betaflight, we've still got the drone plugged in, let's go into the modes tab. Let's grab our radio and turn it back on if you turned it off. And what we're gonna do here is we are going to assign the functions of these switches on the radio. So this is all personal preference. You can set up the switches however you want them to be, but I'm gonna show you how we set them up on our house build. So we're gonna do the arm switch first, which we want to be this switch. And so all I do is for the arming function, I hit add range. And because the radio is bound and everything's powered up, I can just move the switch and it automatically detects aux one here. So let's put the switch in the position that I want it to be when we're armed, which will be all the way toward me. And then we can drag this slider so that it lines up with this tick mark. And then anytime this switch is not in that position, it moves the tick mark away from the valid section of the slider. So we're disarmed for these two positions and armed for the all the way up position. We're also gonna set up an angle mode, hit add range and we'll put that on this switch. We'll just make that all the way toward me as well. And so if you wanna have the ability to fly with the assistance of an accelerometer, you have that option on that switch. Next up we are going to set up, ooh, flip after crash, aka turtle mode. Let's put that on this switch. All right, again, just all the way towards me. And then where's our beeper? Beeper, here we go. Add range, we'll put it on this one. All right, everything should be set. We'll hit save. So because the drone is plugged in via USB, Betaflight disables arming as a safety precaution, which is awesome. So we can flip to the armed position and we can see that it does move it to the valid area, but you know, it shows disabled there. Or we can show the angle mode is working. I think the only thing that's actually gonna work is that annoying beeper. But we've got all our switches set up here. In fact, let's go ahead and unplug this battery so we stop cooking the vista. We can power this down too. And the last thing to set up is the on-screen display elements. Again, total personal preference. Set up the on-screen display however you want and the items that I'm showing here that are turned on and how they're arranged are just how we do it on our house builds. But again, have fun with it. Do whatever, set it up in whatever way is gonna be easiest for you to read and understand. So with that, hit save. And guys, we've done everything we need to do on this. All right, the drone is all set up and ready to rip. We tested the motors, they spun up. Everything is looking great. Like I said, we could put props on this and fly. And if you're gonna do that, then just take these other carbon fiber pieces and throw them away. Now save them in case you ever wanna use ducts. You'll need these carbon pieces and some more of the eight millimeter screws included with the frame kit if you wanna install the ducts. So let's show you how to do that now. We've got everything we need here. We've got the duct mounting pieces. We've got the screws. We've got everything but the ducts themselves which must be purchased separately. So if you buy a duct kit, you get two ducts and you get two longer screws. So let's go grab our duct mounting pieces. You'll see that they've got press nuts in them here. You're gonna flip those so that those face downward and then you're going to line the piece up under the arms like that. Now our screws just drop through these holes in the tip of the arm. Just start one. Just get them both finger tight so that everything is lined up and then crank them down. Repeat for the other side. Now the drone is set up to have the ducts installed. I wanted to have the duct mounting pieces as separate pieces so that if you are flying with unshrotted props, you don't have these long fingers sticking off that can just get broken. And if you are running ducts and you do break them, you can replace this piece without having to replace the whole arm or the whole main plate or anything like that. So we're gonna remove a couple of screws here to mount the ducts. We're gonna remove the rear standoff screws and the top camera plate screws. We're just gonna do one side at a time so this standoff doesn't fall out. Just remove this and that. So grab your ducts. You want this tab that sticks out here is going to go over this rear screw hole. So they only really go on one way like that. If you grab the wrong one, it's not gonna make any sense. So find the right duct, put it in place. And for the rear, you can use the original eight millimeter screw. Just thread it through the soft material, through the carbon, back into the standoff. Loosely, don't torque it down yet. And now for the front, this is where you need the longer screws that came with the ducts. Grab these long screws, push them through, and snug them up. Now turn your attention to the bottom of the drone. You want to get these fingers lined up with this feature of the duct. It'll sit in there like that. Just more eight millimeter screws that go through the carbon and thread right into the duct itself. There's one there, one on the other side. And then one last one right in the middle. Got one duct fully installed. We can go around and snug the screws up a little bit more. The ones that thread into the standoffs, you can really crank down, just make sure you don't severely deform the ducts tab here. And the ones in here, you know, snug them up pretty good, but not so much that you strip out the soft material that it's threading into. And we'll do the other side. Pull the eight mil screw out up top. That's where our long screw is going to go in with the duct. We'll screw out the back, line it up. Can help to pre-thread this into the rear. There you go. All right, the skyline is all hooked up with some ducts and ready to whoop. We just need to add a battery pad, battery strap, and of course some props. Peeler, ticker down. Boom. Gonna try and wrap this strap onto the top plate. Definitely easier to put the strap in there before you install the ducts. There we go. Let's get our props. The props are rotating outward. So find the top of the prop. It's got some numbers on there. They're spinning with the leading edge on the upward side. It spins up for going up. On these whoops, we spin the props outward. So the counterclockwise props are going to go here and here. And you can see the other two props are of the opposite orientation. These go clockwise. So those go there and there. Add some prop nuts. Just like that, we've got ducts engaged. This thing is ready to whoop, but we're going to do one last step. And that is install an action camera mount. Now in my open prop freestyle drones, I usually use a camera mount that wraps around the camera to provide a little bit of protection and fix the camera angle. But when I am doing whoop style flying, I like to use this tabbed mount that makes it easy to switch between cameras and adjust angles on the fly. The trade-off is you don't protect the camera as much, but when you're flying a ducted drone, you're not going to have the same heavy crashes that you have when you're flying a freestyle drone. So let's put this thing on. To install the action camera mount, just loosen up the upper horizontal screws. If you have the ducts installed, you don't need to remove them completely from the 3D printed bits. You just need to have them unthreaded from the horizontal standoff, which you need to remove. And then also remove the front two top plate screws. Now grab the 3D printed mount and take that standoff that you removed and slide it into the sleeve. And then take the two screws that you removed from the top plate and thread them a bit into the two screw holes. Then slide them out into place, screw back in the two horizontal screws so that they thread into the standoff that's now inside the mount and then tighten up the two top plate screws so that everything is fastened. And now you can install your action camera onto the tab mount, just like you would with any other accessory. Just set your angle and tighten it down. Or if you're using a fixed angle wrap around mount, just slide the camera into the mount. There's a lot of fun to fly around here, whooping around, hitting all the gaps, getting up in all the scaffolding, doing some chasing. It's an absolute blast, but I think we can have even more fun. So we've got the same drone setup, but without ducts. So in this configuration, we are flying around with a 1500 milliamp hour 4S battery and a full GoPro Hero 9. So it's got some weight to it, but that big battery gives us really nice flight times. And these ducts let us bounce all things. It's safe to fly around people and we're not gonna damage anything. This is a lot spicier. So with it being open propped, we really can't be doing the same type of flying, but that's not what this is for in the first place. We've stopped the props up to three and a half inches and we lightened it up by going down to an 850 milliamp hour battery and swapped out the bigger camera for the much smaller DJI action too. So this should be really nimble, really acrobatic. I'm hoping this thing is an absolute rip machine. Like it's too, it's like too much. Like it almost feels like a full five inch, not quite, cause I mean it is physically smaller. So it definitely is more manageable, but the power, it's too much for a spot like this. So this is really gonna be more fun outside at more open spots. So stay tuned for that on my channel and here on future episodes, I'm sure. And this is available now at Rotorad.com. You can get just the frame kit if you wanna use your own electronics or you can get build kits with all the parts that we use to put it together today as either a whoop or this little ripper. So however you wanna do it, whether you wanna have the ducted or whether you wanna make it open prop and just shred around, this thing's got you covered. So guys, thank you for tuning in. I'm Ledred, I'll see you next time on Rotorad.