 What's up everybody? Welcome back to Rotor Riot. This is going to be quad mods where we take this Yixing wizard and we get it a little bit closer to something that we might actually build for ourselves. When I first heard we were doing this series my thought was why are we promoting the Yixing wizard? That's not really something that we would want people to get into but that's not really the point. The point is we know you guys are going to go get something like this because it's the most affordable way to get everything going. So instead of fighting it let's help you guys figure out what things you can do to improve upon it and make it something that will work for you and be more reliable. So in the first episode Tommy took this guy and he did a couple mods to it. Number one he replaced the camera for a much higher quality one. He also changed the protocol of the receiver from PPM to iBus and which is going to give you a much faster response out of your controls. And then he did some Betaflight tweaking and tuning which makes a big difference in how these things fly. He also added his very own umma grip. Umma grip however you want to say it. And then he took the antennas and he stuck them out on the arms as opposed to up through these holes or however they had it. Now that we've talked about what Tommy did we've given you a little overview of what we got going here. Let's go take it outside. Let's see how it flies after Tommy's mods. Okay so right off the bat 3S is not quite the same power I'm used to. Actually you know what this battery is kind of almost dead already but whatever we'll rock with it. It's just to get the feel of how it flies which minus the power seems like it flies just fine. I think he uh I think Tommy did some tuning to it and some Betaflight you know magic. Not bad. Let's take it to the bench shall we? All right all right I would say for a 3S wizard not too bad. Tommy got this thing to actually fly pretty good between using the iBus I think that helps and the tweaks that he did in Betaflight. I think my mods are just going to be more preference stuff and just the small things. I don't think it's going to end up flying a whole lot better maybe if the next guy uses 4S that'll help but I'll show you the things that I would do if this was mine. Although they didn't blow up in on me props that come with it are known to just kind of I know it's tempting to use them because they give you like 10 sets with this thing but use these at your own risk. One of my mods is going to be get rid of these things. These don't do anything for you. They might keep a little dirt out of there but then you also can't like inspect anything in there. You can't access anything and it makes it more of a pain in the butt to take apart and put back together. That's mod number one get rid of these they're not doing anything for you. These ones you're going to need those that holds the camera in place. Here's what we're going to do I got a better use for this. We're going to cut little pieces of it and then we can use that to protect your ESC's from the prop coming around and whacking it because I've killed a bunch of ESC's that way you hit something your prop kind of bends down it comes around and just knocks components right off your speed controller so just cut a little chunk of that. You can put that right over there and put a little tape around it hopefully I can find electrical tape. This will kind of do two things in one. So another thing about this guy it comes with these foam landing feet but these have a tendency to just kind of rip off because they're only you know they're just stuck on there with adhesive even though they don't line up perfectly. Another little side benefit we'll get is if you put a little tape around those it really helps them from getting ripped up and torn right off of the quad. This is like a two-for-one mod we got going here at least if you get into crash and the prop hits that it's not going to take the ESC out. I did plan to kind of move these but I don't I don't think that's actually too bad it's away from the carbon it's pretty good it just has a really lightweight zip tie on it so I want to put something a little more robust so that doesn't come loose and be flopping around because if your prop comes around and chops that off you're going to really see a reduction in range but let's make sure that's nice and secure with a stronger zip tie. So the next thing we can do is make sure all these nuts and bolts are snug so it's not necessarily a mod but just general good practice these things have a lot of vibration and it's just really easy for a screw to loosen up a little bit and it's it's not a major deal as long as the screw doesn't come all the way out you don't have a pargo flying off but for the most optimal flight performance you want it to feel nice and rigid and arms don't wiggle or anything like that it's too little to actually see on camera but it's trust me it's wiggling so yeah like I said general practice is just good every few days to check your nuts and bolts kids that's about it for you know freebie mods that you can do with stuff you got laying around the next thing I would like to switch out on this even though it it works fine is the video transmitter I wasn't getting like bad video or anything but just typically older cheaper vtx's are not as good for if you want to fly with other people and we'll replace it with a handy dandy uh immersion rc tramp downside is this is like trickier setup for video transmitters than a current flight controller because normally I could just like solder it right to the flight controller but I got to follow this wire see where it goes see where we're getting power from see where the the white wire which is your signals I have to figure out how that's attaching to the camera is it going directly there or is there something in between so I'm going to start taking some things apart here we'll find out what the situation is and I can unplug this for now this is for the receiver all right follow the wire here's the white wire and then here's where it's pulling power from so anything on this side of this section of the power distribution board is going to be putting out 12 volts the reason why you know that is because right there where you see that 12 those two jumper pads have been jumped together if I were to desolder that and then do it um jump the bridge on this side then it would put out what says vcc what that means it's the same voltage of your actual battery so if you were using a four cell battery that's roughly 16 volts so as of right now if I plug the four cell battery even though I'm starting off with 16 volts it's going to step that down to 12 it looks like this side is five volts so this one can either do 12 5 or vcc and right now it's putting out five volts these are not regulated this is where the video transmitter is wired to this just puts out whatever the battery is which is fine because this tramp that we're going to use can handle I think up to 24 volts which is more than we're ever going to put through this thing so it should be plenty fine to wire this directly and then another benefit of this another modern more current video transmitters is they have better filtering so even if you just give it raw power off of your battery you're going to get a cleaner video feed than some you know less expensive one let's get the old wire off I have two different things on one pad here this might be a little tricky that wire that I just took off and this is also confirming that these two pads are full voltage that's what the camera is using to know the voltage of your battery so this little periwinkle colored wire that senses the voltage and then it displays it on your camera so you know the status of your battery we're going to have to make sure we put that guy back on somewhere but it doesn't necessarily have to go on the same pad it can pretty much go I think to any positive pad so matter of fact I think I'm going to move it to the next one over just so it's I don't have a difficulty with this wire I'm about to add there we go now I'm going to figure out what wires we're going to need on this guy it may not be the most intuitive thing but it does tell you what every wire is and they're also you know color coded from the bottom up we got positive ground so this is going to be your input voltage the next one up you have a 5 volt that would be if you want to power your camera off of this we've already got that taken care of so that third wire up we won't be using that next v is for video t is for telemetry we're going to try to set up telemetry what that means basically is that you'll be able to switch the channel on this through your goggles and your transmitter and then last is audio we're definitely not using that I'm not a fan of audio I don't need to hear it any wires you're not going to use you can leave them you can cut them or like the cleanest way to do it is to lift up these little tabs here and pull them out oops don't need that wire I'm also not going to use this five volt that's the third one in called this leave this length I'm going to take my power I'll twist it up there we go we got power here's the video signal so I think that's it for the under the hood stuff because this is most likely I can just put it on top now we got to try to tuck this all in and make it not look so messy let's try ur3 I don't know if it does the tx rx we'll figure it out in both of these just in case because not 100% sure which one it's going to be but we can figure it out by process of elimination if we can't get it working on one we'll move it over to the other we'll figure it out so um tx and then rx so it's transmit and receive and I'm just not 100% sure because a lot of times when you see tx and rx you'll kind of have something similar on the other end as well so typically you're going to hook up yeah tx to rx rx to tx but this just has telemetry so I'm not 100% sure if it should go to the transmit or the receive but we'll figure it out let's just try it here first so we got this guy put on I do not have access to beta flight at the moment right now we just want to make sure we got video and I think we're also going to do a upgrade to foresell and see how that flies so let me get this thing put back together I need some kind of adhesive whatever happened to using gum like all in the old school movies you'd always see them using gum to stick things together I've never seen a person do that in real life let's bring that back huh and boom we got some uh gym fan hulky 50 55 let's try these out oh yeah I believe we're ready to go give it another test flight let's do it huh let's give this another shot and see how she does oh and it's much worse now it doesn't even fly at all I feel like this is like taking a crap on us hmm this ain't good yeah that that ESC is going dead smell that should we make it should we make it catch on fire yeah you see how it's melting this is not the best resolution to this episode uh thanks for watching we're not going to give up that easy because papa capper found us some ESCs we can swap out one of the reasons why we don't recommend this is because they're just known for these ESCs to just quit their desire to live for no reason we burned up a ESC so instead of just uh forcing drew to do that mod we're going to do that another thing uh Chad pointed out is I made a rookie mistake a lot of these bind and flies direct from china quads come with rpsma video transmitters meaning that the pin is on the transmitter and not on the antenna double hole but no pin that's just not how it works you got to have one pin and one hole insert your own joke there get rid of that guy replace it with that guy we're going to pull these ESCs off we're going to replace them with these guys I'm not sure much about these but it can't be worse than what's on it so so I like to do all the work just right here on the arm so instead of re instead of using these wires that are on this ESC I'm just going to strip that down bear strip that down bear that way all I have to do is just work right here at the arm I don't have to follow it into the pdb and all that stuff I found that a lot of times if you wire them straight across without crossing the wires it'll go counterclockwise not always it depends on I think the factor on that is how the motor is wound I'm not sure different motor ESC combinations will go a different way if you don't cross any wires if I'm wrong I can just flip them all around so before we plug this in to test it out let's make sure we have the appropriate antenna on there is this guy is rpsma which is what the stock video transmitter is the one we put on there the immersion rc tramp is sma so we need an sma antenna so make sure you put that on there before you plug it in no fire that's great I'm happy with that except one of them doesn't spin so that's not good why is this one not working I don't know okay so it could be there's something wrong with that motor it could be the speed controller is bad it could be the flight controllers and just not putting any signal out on that output the best way to figure things out like that is to just start moving stuff around so what I'm going to do I'm going to put that motor over here I'm going to put this motor over there so if now this motor doesn't work anymore that means that that motor is bad because the problem followed it over there if still this arm of the quad doesn't spin then we can at least rule out that it's the motor it still doesn't spin or maybe this ESC is no good right out of the box next step swap it out with one of the original ones and uh at least isolate that that's the problem that that alone will make me feel better we'll have drew put on some nice high quality ESCs but for now I'm just trying to get this thing to fly so you actually can mix match ESCs it won't be the end of the world uh there's a chance that it could fly a little wonky like maybe they're not exactly the same protocol are not exactly calibrated the same way but for at least testing purposes it should be fine and in a pinch I've done it before I've put different ESCs together ideally you want them to be the same but it's it's not a big deal to mix them you know it spins again so thanks Chad you gave me a bum ESC I think we can get a little more out of this so our our cpu loads only at 8% and we can also take off the accelerometer because we're not going to use that I'm sure we can get at least up to a 4 kilohertz update in gyro and pit loop it's got 19% that so that should make a difference it should fly better so you can safely go to maybe like 30 or 40 and we were only using eight percent let's give it a shot see how she flies so far so good they're all spinning that one's acting a little funny that's the one that's a different ESC please don't wait out all right oh boy video seems a lot better now that we have the proper antenna on it hasn't burned up yet I'm happy with that it's legit this is like feels not too far off from what I'm used to flying so a couple little modifications it's they don't come too far off from being good to fly it's just a couple of the things you're going to want to switch right off the bat and one of them is the speed controller okay that went a lot better this time I'm pleased with the performance now let's just recap what we did okay so first and foremost we did the little ESC protectors by cutting up these little crappy props that's going to help you work for when this situation happens we took these out because they're not really doing much but blocking airflow and adding weight and making it more of a pain in butt to take apart and put back together I just did a little tweak on what Tommy had with these he had it kind of running along the arm and I just angle angled it out a little bit and put a stronger zip tie on it so that the antenna is a little further away from the carbon so that's all easy free stuff you can do without having to buy anything the only intended upgrade was to switch the video transmitter out but in testing that we burned up a speed controller so that's probably the first thing you should do if you own one of these or you're thinking about buying one because it's cheap go ahead and just switch the speed controllers out right away for like ten dollars per ESC you can get a ESC that will be much more reliable yeah and anytime you do get ESCs it's smart to get a spare same thing with motors these things break they don't last forever there is some chance it's just gonna not work out of the box like even one of these new ones that Chad gave me to replace one of them didn't work so it's just uh unfortunately that's just part of this hobby for now so if you are intending to switch this video transmitter out once again you know pay attention to your SMA and RP SMA use different props these props it comes with are not that great we increased the gyro update rate and the PID loop rate up to 4k from 1k i think is where Tommy had it i think that's about it we'd like to thank you for watching and please support us by visiting store.rotariot.com for all your shopping needs go to quadcamp.com for all your learning needs and sign in for quadbox for all your monthly random goodie needs take it easy i'm gonna go fly a little more in the cold