 What's up, everybody? Welcome to Road to Ride. I'm LesFlyRC, and I am super excited to show you my new drone frame, The Tank. I built this frame to be ultra durable and to take the kind of abuse that I put a frame through. I have a certain flying style that is very abusive and destructive to drone frames. I wanted you to be able to spend more time flying and less time repairing. I'm going to talk about all the steps that I put into building this drone. I'm going to walk you through it step by step from beginning to end. I'm going to go through all the programming. I'm even going to give you guys my tune, my filter settings, and my rates. You guys are going to be able to fly the drone just as I fly it if you want to do that. This drone frame will support not only Fat Shark and Walksnow, which is what I'm flying right now, but it also supports the DJI FPV system with the Caddx Vista. It will also support HD-0 with their race video transmitters and their 25x25 board. It also will support analog, and it can support just about any transmitter that will fit in the back here in an analog setting. You can fly any type of video system you want to fly with this drone. It will all fit, and it will all give you a great experience. With the analog systems and the HD-0 system, I made a custom antenna for the back, and on my Fat Shark Walksnow system, I've got custom side antennas. One thing that they all share, one common thing that they all share is that in a rear crash, they're not going to hit the ground before the arms do, and that's going to make them last a lot longer and keep your antennas from getting crushed in a rear-end crash. Since I spent a lot of time doing trippy spins and matty flips and things like that, I spent a lot of time flying backwards, and I wanted to make sure that these antennas are going to be protected so they're not crushed in the backwards flying style that I like to have. These antennas are even more protected, and they're definitely never going to hit the ground, and that makes them last a really long time. So I'm really happy with the way this came out. I hope you guys like the tank. First we're going to start with our frame. I'm using the Fat Shark Walksnow Avatar HD system with my drones. I use a custom set of antennas when I build my frame set up. I use the OCP antennas from TRC. These give a stronger penetration and range. We've got the Riot Grip battery pad here, the Radiomaster EP1 receiver, and of course you've got to have the green LED lights for the arms. We've got a set of Let's Fly RC 2306 1850KV motors, and we're going to be using the solder-free version of the T-Motor F7 F55 flight controller ESC stack. I also use an upgraded capacitor when I do this build. I use a 1000 Farad Gigantic capacitor that we sell in the road to Riot Store. There's two different kinds of antennas you can use, depending on whether you want to use my custom OCP antennas or whether you want to use the stock antennas that comes with the Walksnow system. So all these 3D printed parts are purchased separately, and I'll be installing these on my build because this is how I fly it. This is a new design that I've been working with Julian from Noosel 3D. He came up with a really amazing idea to make a hybrid arm protector that's going to have PETG inserts inside of a TPU arm protector. So we're actually taking PETG and inserting it inside of TPU, so we have two different types of plastic here. We've got hard PETG material here and soft TPU material here. This is going to protect the arm from impact, and this is going to allow you to skid along the ground. They're not actually even attached to the arm with screws, so you can still get to all your motor screws without having to take off the arm to change your motors. I also designed this for the receiver in case you wanted to mount your receiver with TPU as well. I don't use this typically when I build my own drone, but if you really, really wanted everything to be covered in TPU, you could buy one of these too. We're going to have our top plate, our bottom plate, mid plate. This is a receiver plate, or it can also be used for video transmitter, depending on what type of build you're doing. These two aluminum pieces right here are going to be a cage for the front to protect your camera. This is one of the unique things about the tank that makes it so durable. We'll have four screw packages. This is going to be for our flight controller stack screws. This is our video transmitter screws, our motor screws, and our frame assembly screws. We've got four 8mm thick arms. It's not one of the great features that makes the tank different. I put 8mm thick arms. Yes, I said it, 8mm thick arms. Nobody else has 8mm thick arms in their frame that I know of, and this makes the tank extremely durable. So I just said, what the heck, let's go ahead and put the thickest arms I can put on there to make sure they never break. But if they ever do break, you don't have to take out all the screws and break all the Loctite loose whenever you pull these arms out. You just take out two screws, slide the arm out, and slide a new arm in. If you're ever lucky enough to actually break one of these arms, which I still haven't broken one yet. Of course, you've got our battery strap. It's going to come with a few 3D printed parts and some quad skids, although I will be installing it today with my own custom quad skids with the TPU arm protectors integrated into them. We're going to need our mid plate and our base plate and our four arms and our frame assembly screws and standoffs and of course our aluminum cage. Everything else will just set aside. I like to use a drill to assemble these just because I'm lazy. It takes less time, but if you're going to use something like this, make sure you use the lowest torque setting or be very comfortable with the drill or just go ahead and use hand tools because you don't want to strip out these screws. We've got links ranging from 8mm all the way up to 20mm. We're going to have two different sizes of standoffs as well. We've got 20mm standoffs for the stack height. We've got 25mm standoffs for the cage. The first screws you want to grab is the longest screw. We're going to have four of these and we're going to place them through the stack in a certain way. If you follow this order, it'll be really easy to put it together and the arms aren't going to just flail all over the place. It'll be super easy to put together. Just follow these steps in this order. The first screw is going to go through here in this location on the bottom plate. Then we're going to take our arm, our first arm and place it in this orientation right here. Take our top plate and set it on top just like that. And we're going to temporarily install a standoff just to kind of hold it in place. As you're assembling this, if you just put your thumbs right here and just squeeze it together, it makes everything kind of hold together tightly. We're going to put two more standoffs in the back here. It's kind of held together pretty tightly. We can go ahead and take our second longest screws and put them through the four remaining holes in the bottom plate. As you put this screw in, just kind of put it in there loosely and loosely thread it into the press nuts that are in the mid-plate. You don't want to put it too tight or you're going to have a hard time lining all the rest of them up. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to take off these two front standoffs and replace them with the aluminum cage. You definitely don't want to strip out these aluminum pieces. So to start with, we're just going to lightly put in that one screw and then we're going to follow it up with one of the smallest screws, the 8mm long M3s, and just kind of put the front piece in there just so it's not falling off the frame. All right, same thing on the other side. So now we've got all of our screws in place. Let's set the rest of these off to the side for now. Now we're going to focus on adding some blue thread locker to the frame so that these screws don't come off with all the vibration that happens during crashing. I'm just going to back these screws out just a tiny bit and then I'm just going to drop a drop of blue thread locker into those holes a tiny bit in each of the press nuts. And now we're going to just kind of work it back and forth and work that thread locker into each of the holes. Since we have all the screws in our frame assembly, you can now start to focus on cranking them tight at the same time. And it just makes the assembly process a little easier to add thread locker because you're not focusing on trying to hold the frame together at the same time as adding thread locker to your screws. So we're going to push that one through, add the stand off, crank it down tight. It's going to dip them in there. You don't need a ton of thread locker, but you'll probably lose a lot of it by going through the frame. The most important part is right here at the tip. The last four screws here we're going to add thread locker to as well. Put the screws into the aluminum piece by hand and make sure you turn it a few turns before putting any kind of tool on it because you definitely don't want to strip out these beautiful pieces of aluminum. After you add Loctite to all the screws, it's always a good idea to go ahead and wipe off the excess Loctite just so it doesn't get all over everything during the build. We're just going to pull out our camera and video transmitter. We're going to take out the screws and we're not going to use these antennas for my build, but these antennas are useful if you want to use these antennas on your own build. Personally, I get more range of penetration out of the OCP antennas, so I'm just going to set these aside. This bag of screws is what we're going to use to install our video transmitter. We're going to need these two 3D printed parts to install our OCP antennas, and they're also going to act as spacers to space up the walk snail video transmitter because the both sides of this video transmitter are heat sinks, so if you just place it down on top of the carbon, you're not giving any airflow to this underside, so what this will act as both an antenna holder and a spacer to space up the video transmitter off the carbon to allow it to get better airflow, and it'll also give us a location to mount our receiver. We have to do all of these steps pretty much at the same time because they all have a particular placement, and since this frame is very, very small and compact, everything kind of just fits in one way. I'm using the EP1 receiver from Radiomaster, and we're going to be installing that as well when we do this video transmitter. I'm going to turn the soldering iron to about 350 degrees for this step. The next step is going to be to wire up our Radiomaster EP1 receiver and get it prepared for mounting to the frame. So we have to wire four wires to this receiver. We're going to have power, ground, Rx and Tx. Unfortunately, the Radiomaster receiver does not come with wires, so you're going to have to source your own wires. I like to use black, red, white, and gray, and I'm just going to steal a little bit of extra wire off of one of these pigtails that we have here at the store. I'm going to cut off about five inches of wire. It's excess, but I would rather have too much than too little, and like I said, I just want red, black, white, and gray. Those are my favorite four colors to use for this. I always use white for my Tx at the flight controller, which is going to be connected to the Rx of the receiver, and that's just something I try to keep consistent with all my builds, and that way I know which ones are Rx and Tx. Let's go ahead and tin up these four wires and the four pads on the receiver, and then we can join them together. Whenever you're soldering, it's always a good idea to make sure your tip is nice and clean before you start. Start with a nice, shiny tip like that before you go to solder, and make sure any excess solder has been wiped off before you start with some tiny soldering like this. The Radiomaster EP1 has really, really tiny pads, and it's really hard to solder to. I usually solder to this side so that all the bulk of the wire is on the same side as the bulk of the antenna, even though the markings are on the other side to tell you which pad is which function. I'm going to go ahead and just tin these four pads up on this side here. It's always a good idea to make sure your solder joints are a nice, silver, shiny ball of solder. On the back side, we can see that this edge pin here is ground, so we're going to go ahead and solder the ground wire to that pad. There's our ground. The next one is going to be VCC or power, so that's going to be our red wire, and then we're going to have Tx and Rx. The next one is gray and then white. We want this Tx to be gray so that the Rx is white, and that's going to make sure that our Tx on our flight controller is white. As long as you keep it consistent, it doesn't matter, but use whatever color you want. This way, I won't make a mistake in the future if I need to do any repairs. The next thing I do after soldering these four wires is I rotate my antenna 180 degrees so that it comes out in the same direction as my wires. And now when I heat shrink it, this antenna will never come off. This UFL connector is going to stay nice and solid, and the heat shrink is going to keep it in place. So then we take the heat shrink that comes with the EP1 receiver, which in my opinion is a little bit too small. Make sure that it's covering the wires, which is the most important part right there. This butane pencil lighter is amazing. I like to carry this in my Rotorat tool pouch because I can refill it with butane, and it works great in the field for doing repairs. I got a little bit of a flame there, just enough to heat up my heat shrink. Very nice. The next thing I like to do is just twist these wires up because if you twist the wires now, and you cut them too short later, that additional twist you put in the wire is going to give you a little bit of extra slack in the future. It's always a good idea to have a little bit of extra slack in case you need to do repairs. If you really want to use the 3D printed part, you can take this 3D printed part, place your receiver inside of the 3D printed part and bring the wires to it, and then lock it in place by pressing down on the TPU here, and then this will actually mount underneath these antennas in the frame. We're going to bring our frame back into the picture. I generally just double-sided tape this receiver underneath my video transmitter a little bit back here. When I'm done, I want my antenna to line up right about here in between the flight controller stack and the video transmitter. It's going to line up right in there. Once it's done, it'll never get damaged in a crash. Some people would argue that having it right next to the carbon fiber like this would reduce your range, and that's true. But in my situation, in flying in all the bandos and concrete buildings and the metal that I fly through, so far I have never had a problem with range or penetration mounting it this way, so I continue to do it and it works fine. And it's extremely durable, and that's what's most important to me, is not having to fix things as much. I really wanted to make this frame and repair less. We're going to take a piece of this 3MVHB tape and set it on the frame right in that position. We're going to try to make sure not to block any of these holes in case we need them for installation. Another great advantage of having this double-sided tape here is that it adds a layer of cushion for impact. Radiomaster made a new version of this and they put the LED light on the other side, which actually makes more sense, but the reason we're mounting this upside down is so we can see the little green light flash whenever this powers up. Because that tells us the status of this receiver and whether it's in Wi-Fi mode or whether it's in receiver mode, and we need to be able to see that, so we're mounting it upside down like that on top of the double-sided tape. And remember, we're keeping this antenna in between the flight controller stack and our VTX. This frame supports not only 25x25, but also 20mmx20mm mounting hole pattern. But for the walk snail system, we're going to be using the 25x25mm pattern. Now though, we're going to need to install our OCP antennas into the 3D printed mounts. Let's place the 3D printed mount in the orientation that it's going to go through the frame. This is our spacer standoffs right here that are going to give it a little bit of height on our video transmitter and the flat part goes down. When we put this in, we're going to make sure that our UFL connector is pointing up in the upward orientation. Slide our antenna in until it bottoms out. After you install your antenna into the mount, it's always a good idea to take some heat shrink. I like the clear heat shrink just because it looks better. And install it over top of the end to keep the antenna from popping out and to keep it protected. One problem I always run into with my heat shrink is that it's not big enough to go over what I'm trying to put it on. So you can use a pair of needle nose pliers and stretch it out prior to installing it. And it'll allow it to fit an object that's larger than it's designed to fit. Slide it right over. Break out our heat gun and heat it down. And repeat that step for the other side. Since these walk snail video transmitters come with left hand circular polarized antennas, most people use left hand circular polarized antennas on their goggles. And that's why most people are running left hand. And that's exactly why I'm running right hand because I don't want to be like most people. It'll help to keep you from interfering with your buddies together if you're using opposing polarization. So I typically run right hand since almost everybody else is running left hand. If it curls up on you you can just kind of press it down on the table. There you go. And that'll keep the antenna installed inside the 3D printed mount and keep it from popping out and keep it extra durable and protected. Now we've got our antennas installed. We're going to orient them on the frame like this. And we're going to figure out the best placement for these UFLs on our video transmitter. And you're going to have to put a little bit of a curl into each one of the antenna connectors in order for it to be able to plug into the walk snail video transmitter. A lot of people complain about the walk snail video transmitter and having to take out these little tiny baby screws. Nobody seems to have a screwdriver that tiny. Rather than taking out those three little screws I've found it to be a lot easier. Take a flathead screwdriver and line it up to this spot right here and insert the screwdriver and twist. Can you hear that little pop right there? That clicking sound you just heard is the blue thermal paste releasing from the two pieces. This is really the all that holds this together and it's not even glue. It's just more of a thermal paste meant to keep this circuit attached to this metal object. Taking this off is so much easier. Now you can access your two UFL ports without having to deal with those three little fiddly screws. So you pop your two antennas on there and back this metal plate right back in place after you have your antennas in place and everything's good to go. This is going to fall off the first time it gets hot anyway. So this isn't really hurting anything. Once this thermal paste heats up the first time you fly your drone this thermal paste is going to be very liquidy and loose and this plate typically tends to fall right off immediately. So you never want to just mount these down with double-sided tape. I see a lot of people just mounting these down with double-sided tape and if you're going to do that you want to be sure to at least put four screws and lock nuts on it prior to double-sided taping it down so that way it doesn't fall apart in flight. You definitely don't want to lose this thing because of a hard crash. So now we've got it apart we can take our UFL connectors and position them on the board where they're going to be. Sometimes these are a little bit tricky to lock in place. You want to make sure that you don't damage the UFL and the process of pushing this down. Still on there little crooked. There we go. Click. Use my fingernail. Press down on it. Boom. Locked in place. So now we've got them locked in place. We're going to go ahead and put our metal plate back on and just kind of line it up and press in place. This is upside down but this is basically the orientation we want it to be while it's inside the frame. We're going to take this thing flip it over and mount it on the frame. I'm just going to leave our camera hanging out up there for a minute. We're going to throw up one of our M2 screws through one of the 25 by 25 mounting holes. Try to hold it with our finger as we slide down our first piece of TPU. The first one or two screws are a little bit tricky. But once you get one or two of them in there it's not so bad. TPU kind of holds it in place. That's one side. Go ahead and line up our video transmitter on top of those two screws. The receiver fits underneath there nicely and is not being crushed by the video transmitter. And the video transmitter has excellent ventilation on top and bottom. I'm just loosely putting these nylon nuts on to kind of hold everything in place because the next thing I'm going to do is try to feed my WaxNail video transmitter wires under there and through and out this hole in the front. But in the meantime, I want to try to get these antennas in place because lining up these UFL cables is probably one of the hardest parts of this installation. Last one. There we go. Now that we have the four screws and four nylon nuts lightly placed in there, we have enough room to run our wires underneath and plug it into the WaxNail video transmitter before cranking everything down. The T-motor flight control we're using comes with a DJI to T-motor cable. That's not going to work. We have this cable at that store that we have custom made for this situation. This flight controller has a proprietary connector for the DJI FPV system that snaps in place and we have custom made this cable to make it work with the WaxNail video transmitter. This video transmitter is going to be used on TX2 and RX2 or UART2 inside of Betaflight, so we need to remember when it comes time to programming this, we need to remember that our video transmitter is on UART2. In order to make this cable work properly with this flight controller and video transmitter, we're going to have to remove the green and the black by deep pinning them and taking them out. And then everything should just be plug and play and this video transmitter will work great with this flight controller. If you're going to use the razor blade for this method, just be very careful not to poke yourself. We're just going to pull out the black and the green, push our little white connectors back into their spot and do the same thing to the other side. Just deep pin this. If you don't feel comfortable using a razor blade, pair of wire cutters, but I always like to save these wires for future builds. Now our cable is ready to be installed into the video transmitter. Just going to kind of push it through here and feed it through to where the flight controller will be. We're going to go ahead and plug this guy in and then pull the slack. Just make sure to get the pins lined up in the proper orientation. If you get it upside down, you're going to have a bad day. You want to be able to see the metal facing up from the connectors when you install this. That way you know how you have it in the right orientation. Push it in. Now with that in place, I can pull the remaining slack through. We don't want to crush these wires between the TPU and the video transmitter either, so make sure that they go through that hole. Strategically align them and squeeze everything together. Tighten the four screws and the four nylon nuts. Be careful not to go too tight, but also you don't want it to be coming loose in flight. The good thing about having this TPU underneath it is it acts like a spring and it acts like a locking mechanism for these nuts. It keeps it in place if you give it a little bit of pressure against the TPU. If you really want to be sure that these nuts don't fall off, you can take the additional four nylon nuts that come in the package and put them down on top of the four that are already there and they will lock together to keep the nuts from being able to come off from vibration. We'll just do that on all four of them and this will just guarantee that we don't have these nuts come loose in flight. Normally in a build I wouldn't run this cable first. I would go ahead and do all my soldering to my flight controller and ESC, but because of the way this frame is designed and one of the things that's great about it is I'm going to actually be pointing my ESC wires outward versus forward and back. On the Ledgerb frame where I used to fly forward and backwards and that put the wires right over top of this cable. If you get any heat on this cable, you will destroy it right away. These cables are very very fragile and you want to keep them away from the soldering iron. The cool thing about this setup is that these wires are always easy to access on the outsides and they're away from this sensitive wire. The next step is to go ahead and mount our camera to the front. Let's go ahead and pull out our two TPU camera mounts. Now these camera mounts can be flipped upside down or regular and they're not going to change the camera angle. But in order to get these on the right side, you're going to pretend you're sitting in the drone and whichever side is on your left is going to be the left and whichever side is on your right is on the right. These 3D printed parts were an amazing idea. It was an idea from Ledgerb on his Skyliner and I just love this idea so I had to copy it from my frame. It's so great because you can redesign these 3D printed parts to fit just about any camera that you can dream of. And these new prints actually have two notched holes for the DJI and the walk snail cameras and then a center hole in case you're using an analog camera or a camera that just happens to have one hole. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to take this walk snail camera and we're going to make sure this arrow is facing up. We're going to line it up with the holes and insert the screws. We're going to grab our 1.5mm driver and we're going to grab our M2 screws from our walk snail bag. Find the right length of screws that come with a whole bunch of different lengths. The correct screw length for this camera is the medium size screw. There's a small, a medium, and a large. We're going to use the one that's in the middle and that should be a 4mm M2 screw. If you magnetize your driver it usually holds onto the screw pretty well and allows you to insert it into the TPU. I typically run a 15-degree camera angle but you can run whichever angle you're comfortable with. One on the top, one on the bottom, whichever camera angle you want to fly. Just kind of spin it until it lines up eventually. Alright, we'll repeat that on the other side. If you put them in there loosely you can kind of adjust your camera angle after inserting the two screws and get it just where you want it to be. Alright, now once you have all four screws in place, go ahead and lock them down and your camera angle will be set. The next step is going to be to mount our ESC flight controller stack and at least get the ESC and flight controller in place. We want to try to make sure we have as much space between the flight controller and the top plate as possible for our battery straps so that it's not crushing down on the flight controller. So in order to get the optimal spacing we're going to use these four TPU spacers underneath the flight controller. Now different flight controllers are going to have different thicknesses of gummies and you may not need these depending on the flight controller that you're using. This particular ESC, the F55 amp by T-Motor has a 2mm gummy on the bottom and a 2mm gummy on the top. So in this particular situation we're going to need the additional 2mm TPU underneath the 2mm gummy in order to keep these capacitors from touching the press nuts and screws in the frame. One of the amazing features about this frame is something that I copied from Alex Van Over and he put press nuts in the four locations for the flight controller stack screws. Why haven't we been doing that from the very beginning? We should have all been doing this this is an amazing idea and I'm glad that he came up with it so I could copy it. There's a whole bunch of M3 nylon nuts in here just in case you need to use them for additional stack spacing. Let's go ahead and take our 20mm 3 screws from our flight controller stack bag and thread them through. I want to reiterate one of the greatest things about this frame is that you don't have to take out all of these screws when you need to remove one arm. If you actually manage to break one of these arms all you have to do is take out two screws and break the lock tight loose on two screws and the arm slides right out. As you can see the head of the flight controller stack screws in there, these arms are notched specifically to get past those stack screws so you can slide out the arm without having to take apart the entire frame. One of the bad things I've seen in some of the previous frames that I've flown is that you had to loosen up all of the screws on the bottom plate in order to get the arm out and that broke the lock tight loose in the field on all of those screws which means eventually those screws are going to rat a loose and you're going to end up with missing screws in flight but that arm comes out and goes right in no matter how hard I crank down those screws. It's amazing how easy that works and how easy it is to change an arm and I love this design and I hope other people start incorporating it in their designs as well. Last stack screw. I'm kind of cheating a little bit by using this solder free stack because I'm not going to be using solder free motors. I'm actually just going to be snipping off the solder free ends so that I can install LED lights on the arm in my build and not have to wire all these additional solder joints it's going to save me about 14 solder joints by using this solder free stack. Before I actually install this on the frame I need to make this capacitor fit underneath the top plate. Right now this capacitor won't fit underneath the top plate because it sticks up too high so what we're going to do is we're going to cut this heat shrink off and we're going to bend the capacitor down because in this frame design I specifically made a channel right down here for the capacitor to mount and what I typically do on my builds is I take off this little bitty dinky capacitor and I put on a giant 1000 microfarad capacitor from the Rotorite store but if you don't feel like doing that you can simply cut the heat shrink off of this and bend the capacitor down into that cavity as you slide the ESC onto the frame and this keeps the capacitor from getting ripped off from being bent back and forth this is what I was trying to avoid on a lot of other frame designs I'll see this capacitor heat shrunk to this wire and when you bend it back so many times eventually that capacitor breaks the leads off and then you don't have a capacitor but you don't know you don't have a capacitor it looks like your capacitor is still there but those leads are broken so you don't know if it's actually working or not this way protects the capacitor and keeps it from ever getting broken off and this wire slides right up through the top plate keeping your power wires away from your motors and your props and we're going to go ahead and solder on the big boy capacitor I want to make sure I have plenty of space to drop down into its cavity so I'm going to go ahead and bend these leads like that I want to first make sure I get positive and negative on the right side the gold stripe has a negative symbol on it and that goes on the black side so we want to make sure our positive and negative is on the right side to begin with don't want to wire this up backwards another way to know a capacitor's positive and negative polarity is by the length of the wire they typically make the longer lead positive and the shorter lead negative about 4mm down from the flight controller and then we're going to put another bend into those wires there just like that we're going to cut off the excess we only need about the pad length of wire next we're going to tin the two ends of this capacitor and we're going to tin the bottom two pads of the ESC and we're going to join them together good little tip that Drew gave me is to tape your electronics down to the table makes it easier to solder to I'm going to crank her up to 450 degrees next we're going to go ahead and tin up the ESC the base of the pads of the ESC power wires the negative has a lot of copper in this ESC there we go we got it again make sure you get your orientation right your negative and your positive needs to be in the right direction space out your wires just right to where they line up with your pads and let's go ahead and solder them down can you see that alright there we go install our four 3D printed spacers over the stack screws I'm just going to kind of finagle this and bend the capacitor to the right height so that it fits right into that cavity making sure not to let the two positive and negative leads touch each other now that I have those 3D printed spacers in place the ESC is the proper distance from the press nuts keeping the capacitors from touching the press nuts now that our ESC is in place we're going to find our tag apart from our T-motor flight control stack this is the cable that goes between the flight controller and the ESC on the T-motor F7 stack and they're labeled flight controller and ESC so that you can easily know which one goes where we're going to plug the ESC side into the ESC and plug it into the flight controller get our spacing proper and get our flight controller mounted as well kind of bend the wires into an L shape like that to allow me to easily slide it down in there and press it in with my finger be careful not to bend any of the pins when you're installing this I usually like to do it with my fingers that way I know that I can feel the pressure and make sure that everything is lining up properly make sure that the labeling is facing upwards or away from the board when putting in the flight controller harness lock it in place the arrow is going to face forward when you put this down and before you put the flight controller in place we need to get the proper spacing of the ESC so that the two don't touch each other the T-motor stack comes with some spacers in the packaging here so we're going to take our four smaller spacers and put them in between the flight controller and the ESC so now with the two harnesses in place and the arrow facing forward and our four spacers in place we can slide the flight controller on top of our ESC with the arrow facing forward press it down in place and the four lock nuts to go on the top with my frame you're not going to want to use the four lock nuts that come with the T-motor flight controller stack they're going to have to be tightened down so tight they're going to crush the flight controller and the ESC together so instead we're going to use the nylon nuts that came with my frame and it'll have perfect spacing and just in right amount of torque to keep the gummies uncompressed and uncrushed we'll still have enough room for our battery strap on top of the flight controller let's go ahead and get our rotor riot 5.5 box driver just get those just the right amount of torque that's where they're not going to fall off and they're not crushing the flight controller gummies so all four positions of the gummy on the ESC and the flight controller should have just the right amount of compression to where they're not being crushed or squished the next thing we're going to do is plug in our walk snail harness into our flight controller port right there I'm going to try to take all these wires at the end and just kind of put a little tiny zip tie around them all to keep them bundled and to keep them from moving around whenever you crash into something and it'll also lock this antenna in place at the same time so it's not shifting back and forth in order to wire up our receiver we're going to use ground 5 volts R1 and T1 and we're going to hook up to the UART number 1 for our receiver we're going to have to set beta flight UART 1 to serial and that will get our receiver and our walk snail set up properly in beta flight. I'm just going to cut these to length I'm going to get them about where I want them with a little bit of slack I like to have a little bit of slack in my wires like I was saying in case we ever have to do a repair in the future if you have a wire that needs to be re-soldered sometimes you make a better solder joint so we're going to go ahead and just cut those to lengths with a little bit of slack and then we're going to use our fingernail or our wire cutters to strip the wire ends tend the flight controller pads and hook it to the flight controller. I like to do them all for the same time just because I've gotten good at it and we're going to push it off to the side to get it away from all of our electronics when we go to tenets so that we're not soldering on top of our flight controller because we don't want any of the solder balls to end up inside of our flight controller. Make sure you start with a clean solder tip before we start messing with the flight controller I'm going to go down from 450 down to 350 degrees because we don't want to damage the pads on our flight controller. These pads are very small and it's easy to create a gummy, ugly connection if you don't have a nice clean soldering iron tip we're going to go ahead and tin up those four pads we talked about earlier ground 5 volts R1 and T1 get a nice shiny silver ball solder on each one of those make sure you get these in the right order we're going to go black, red gray, white. If you make an unsuccessful attempt at soldering you want to go ahead and re-tin the wire because you've used up all the flux. Since I did not make that connection proper I'm going to go ahead and re-tin the pad and the wire before I go ahead and try to make this connection because if you burn all the flux off of it it's going to make it really hard for you to make a good connection. Hey how about that? It went right on there. So if you have the right amount of flux left on each of the wires you should have a pretty easy job getting these to connect. Gray goes to R1, white goes T1 based on the way that I wire the receiver route this wire in a way where it's not protruding up anywhere and it's nice and flat against the flight controller because we're going to have a battery strap going right across here and we don't want it to get snagged on any of these cables. And this is where I generally would put the zip tie and I want to go underneath my antenna for my Radiomaster receiver and I want to kind of grab all the wires that are going through here in this zip tie and kind of bunch them all together so that way none of them end up in the props. And if the antenna kind of tips up or down that's fine. It's nowhere near the propellers and if it points up at an angle it's not a big deal. Alright, snip off that zip tie and now all of our wires are bunched together and bundled and safe inside the frame. Guess what motors we're going to use? My Let's Flyer C Motors. Purple and green for Sean. If you haven't noticed yet my favorite colors are purple and green and I tried to theme this drone frame around that color scheme so you'll always see that my frames have a nice blend of purple and green. If you're going to use the hybrid style arm protectors like I like to use we're going to need to use some 3D printed spacers to make sure that the motor screws don't go into the motor windings. One of the things that's very important about installing motors is that you want to make sure that the motor screw does not go past the metal object into the winding because if you put these screws in too tight they can damage the motor wires and cause your ESCs to chatter and not spin properly and the worst case is actually in the back here where the wires come through to exit the motor because they're right above the metal base plate there and if you go any amount past the metal base plate you're going into wires. So you want to try to make sure these screws go exactly through the base plate and no farther up. If you go too small you don't have enough threads locking into the motor then your motors go flying off when you're flying. We want to make sure we have just the right amount of threads into the motor and in order to do that we're going to use these TPU printed spacers to get the length of screw just right. With my frame I've included 16 12 millimeter M3 screws for the motor mounting. We're going to need this 3D printed spacer to make up for that one additional millimeter because I can't buy M3 11 millimeter screws unfortunately they don't exist or I haven't been able to find them at least. If you're going to use these rotor right at quad skids you won't need these 3D printed spacers because they have a built in 1 millimeter spacing already incorporated into the quad skid itself. So you can install these motors with the quad skids or with the 3D printed hybrid quad skid arm protector. To install a quad skid you want to go ahead and insert one of your screws through there and if you're picky about the orientation like I am make sure you get it into the right hole and then we're going to go ahead and take our motor line it up and thread in the one screw. Alright, don't put it in too tight we're going to grab a second screw and go to the opposite corner and get the next screw lightly threaded into the motor. You don't want to go too tight because it's going to get hard to get the other screws in we'll go ahead and get 3 and 4 done and then we can crank them down once we've got all four screws in place and that's the proper mounting method with the rotor riot quad skid now I'm going to demonstrate the way I like to fly it which is with the 3D printed hybrid arm protectors even though these 8 millimeter arms are probably never going to break I like to keep the ends of them looking nice and the 3D printed arm protector will keep them looking nice for a long time so before we put the 3D printed arm protector on we're going to go ahead and mount the motor I want to use blue thread locker whenever you're installing these motors because they experience a lot of vibration we've got our TPU spacer in between our motor and our carbon fiber and as you can see right there the screw did not protrude past the bottom plate of the motor again we're not putting these in really tight because we want to make sure that all four screws are in place before inserting it or you're going to run into a problem like this where the screw doesn't go through I'm going to loosen this motor screw up so that I can insert the second screw and then we're going to move on to the third and fourth screw and then we'll crank them all down alright we'll go ahead and put blue thread locker on and insert our screw into the motor the final screw once we get this one in we can start cranking them all down alright and with them all cranked down you can look in there and see that none of those screws are protruding up past the metal base plate Abracadabra motors go on BOOM! all four motors installed look at that that was fast it's really cool how easy these go on you literally just slide them on there shove them in there and they line up to all the holes these will work without a zip tie if you don't like the look of the zip tie but the zip tie will keep these on and keep them from flying off if you do come into a hard crash I've had a couple of them fly off so I started using zip ties to hold them in place but for now we're going to leave them off so we can go ahead and install our LED lights because it wouldn't be a let's fly RC quad without green LED lights you know you got to have the purple and green everywhere so this is the official rotor riot let's fly RC race wire in green we're going to be installing on this no they're not let's fly RC they're just rotor riot but we're going to put them on the frame and we're going to call them let's fly RC because that's my color so these things just barely fit on there in some race wire configurations the diode facing the other direction won't work so I always just make sure I face the diode towards the motor this little guy right here is a diode just make sure you point the diode towards the motor whenever you install these so that the flow of electrons goes the right direction first thing we're going to do is get this in a position where we want it just going to put the tape on the table upside down I'm going to go ahead and place the race wire on the tape and then I'm just going to kind of cut around it with a razor blade and it'll be the right shape at that point one, two, this tape is activated by pressure so go ahead and push them down pretty hard and then we're just going to kind of cut it off don't do this on your mom's kitchen table you'll get yelled at like I did this is Drew's table so that's okay if you cut yourself it's not my fault and now it looks like it came from the factor that way four double-sided tape race wire now we're going to peel off the red double-sided tape make sure you give yourself enough length to where you can manipulate the wires from the motors you don't want it to be too close to this you won't be able to cut inside of the wires if it's too short so make sure you get the length about that length we'll go ahead and push all four of these down while we're thinking about distance to try to keep them all even try to get about the same distance as the other one there you go, that's about right push it down real hard lock it in place I don't use the heat shrink on these because getting the heat shrink all lined up and soldered in place is a pain in the butt and then when one of them fails you've got to take the heat shrink off it's a huge nightmare so I just put the heat shrink aside and save it for another project later these LED race wires seem to last longer for me just by double-sided taping them down to the arm because they're not able to move or flex and the prop has a harder time hitting them because of how low they are it's just a light that's about right press her down when I cut these solder free connectors I'm going to leave a little bit of slack where it can kind of tuck in like this and that's going to give me a little bit of extra slack in case I ever have to take anything apart if I ever have to pull the flight controller up it's going to give me a little bit of slack where I can pull the ESC up off of the frame I want to put them about that position before I cut them and since these ABC connectors are a little bit offset I'm going to cut them all right at the B and then chop off a little bit of excess off of A and C I line up my wire cutter with the longest wire length and go ahead and cut it and now I'm going to take the first and the last wire and chop off about four millimeters each so that the wires aren't too long to reach their respective pads I'm going to do the same thing with the motor wires and the same thing with all the rest of the wires on the frame and then we'll come back and we'll start soldering if you decided to buy the ESC without the solder free connectors coming off of it you can use the excess wire coming off the motors to go from the ESC to the LED light strip or if you don't want to use the LED light strip you could just run the motor wire straight to the ESC and now we're just going to strip them, tin them, and attach them nice shiny ball of solder just like that and you'll have a nice easy installation of these motor wires I like to start with the center wire because it's in between the other two it just makes it a little bit easier you see how I have a little bit of slack on the wire there I did that on purpose just kind of set the wire on top and press down and hold it in place for a couple seconds while the solder solidifies it's helpful if you take the outer one and place it close to the outer edge when you're soldering and then work it inwards as your solder melts and that will keep it from accidentally touching the center pad we'll start with it on the outer edge there and then put the soldering iron against the wire and then push the wire in as the solder is solidifying and you got your nice three wires there make sure none of these three solder balls touch each other and make sure none of these three solder balls are touching any other piece of metal start with our middle wire touch the wire and press down and continue holding it while it solidifies again using the same concept starting on the outer edge and working it inward that way you don't end up fusing any of them together now repeat that process on the other four arms and tuck these wires up under the ESC so that they're out of the way of the propellers because you don't want to get your wires all chopped up by the propellers just kind of push everything down make sure it's all secured in place there we go, nice and clean these lights make it really easy to find your drone in a tree when you crash even though some people think it's silly and because we're not flying at night these LEDs are extremely bright and can be seen very well in the daytime and I just like them, they're cool so let's go ahead and finish the last couple steps we're going to go ahead and put these two rear standoffs we're going to grab the 20mm standoffs and two 8mm screws go ahead and put some thread locker on the 8mm M3 screws slide it up in the back here and tighten that rear standoff in place we're going to do the same thing with the other one we've got the rear two standoffs in place two front standoffs one of the great things about this frame design is I have these two front standoffs set up to hold an action camera mount this is the gigantic action camera that I fly which is the Hero 9 and the reason I fly it is because it has the best image quality out of any other action camera I've ever flown and it's hard to compete with something magical about Superview and I just can't get away from it this frame on 6S has so much power that even with this heavy heavy camera and this heavy TPU mount you never have a problem pulling out of dives and it gives me that weight to chuck my drone over the trees and it's amazing to have that kind of momentum now would be a good time to go ahead and install the standoffs into your action camera mount whichever action camera mount you choose to get from the RotoRite store or online all these 3D printed parts will be available on Thingiverse, on my Thingiverse and on the RotoRite's Thingiverse in case you want to download and print them yourself or you can buy them in the RotoRite store I'm going to put the screws in with Loctite there as well but before I do that I'm going to go ahead and get everything programmed in Betaflight before I put all this together completely because just in case I need to fix something I don't want to have it all assembled until I've tested everything and made sure that everything spins the right direction and all the connectors and components are working properly so now we're going to go ahead and dive into Betaflight and set up all the settings on this frame my PID settings and my rate settings and all the things that I normally do to set up the drone the way I fly it before we start trying to flash firmware let's first find out which flight controller we need to flash firmware 4 what we're going to do is we're going to click on we're going to go to the firmware flasher tab and we're going to click auto detect and auto detect will tell us that we're using the T-Motor F7 firmware so that's the firmware we're going to need to flash to our flight controller and we're going to want to flash the latest just so we have the latest, greatest firmware we're going to go and flash it on there so we're going to make sure full chip erase is checked and we're going to go ahead and click on load firmware online it will load the firmware and you're going to click flash firmware if the firmware is already loaded in your computer then it will be bold text over here and that means you're not going to actually have to click the load firmware online button because it won't let you and that's the situation with my computer I've already downloaded this firmware before my computer's hard drive I'm going to go ahead and click flash firmware and it's going to go and flash the flight controller with the proper firmware so now that the firmware is loaded on the flight controller I can click connect and apply custom defaults you definitely want to do that, that's going to set up everything in there that needs to be set up to make it T-Motor specific so this gives you a warning we need to set our motor protocol and our accelerometer needs to be calibrated we're going to close that so that the warnings will go away and now our accelerometer is calibrated next thing we're going to do is we're going to go into our ports tab because we talked about earlier how we're going to have to remember that we set up our walk snail video transmitter to ur2 we're going to go ahead and set ur2 to msp configuration and we put our radio master ep1 receiver on ur1 so we're going to go ahead and set serial rx to ur1 we're going to save and reboot and now our ports are set up properly I'm still getting a complaint with this about the motor protocol because we haven't set that up, we'll do that in a minute here so we're going to close that warning in the configuration tab we want to make sure we set rx lost and rx set to on and that way it'll make sure it beeps if we lose our receiver and rx lost and rx set will allow our motors to beep at us if we're running a BL-32 ESC or BlueJ firmware on our ESCs and allow our motors to beep if we lose signal with our radio it will also allow us to set a switch on our radio to flip in order to make the motors beep if we've lost our drone it helps us to find our drone if the battery is still connected we want to make sure we set our maximum arm angle to 180 degrees so that way we can arm at any angle even if we're upside down in a tree and we want to make sure we turn off air mode so that way I can have air mode on a switch and that's going to allow me to do things like skidding on the ground and perching on top of objects so we're going to go ahead and save and reboot after setting up the configuration tab and we're going to move on to the power and battery tab I typically set my maximum to 4.4 so that way I don't get annoying warnings when I plug in a battery that's slightly discharged I go over to failsafe we skip that tab, presets we're going to skip presets for now PID tuning, I'm just going to give you guys a CLI dump for that so I'm going to jump right over into the receiver tab I'm going to make sure that the receiver mode is set to serial I'm going to make sure that the serial receiver protocol type is CRSF for crossfire because the radio master ELRS receiver is running the crossfire protocol make sure that everything else is set properly and hit save and reboot so now we're going to move on to the modes tab and in the modes tab we're going to make sure we set arm on aux one and set it as the maximum setting right here move it over to that location because on ELRS you have to have arm on aux one so I'm going to put air mode on to aux two and I'm going to make air mode all the way to the left so that way if my aux two switches in the regular position, air mode is on if I move it to the center position air mode will be off and then I'm also going to use aux two for my turtle mode or my flip over after crash something that I need to do before I can set up all my modes is I need to go into the motors tab it's not allowing me to do flip over after crash because it still has us as a disabled motor protocol we need to set our motor protocol to d-shot 300 before it's going to allow us access to features that d-shot provides like flip over after crash and beeper mode so once that's set and we save and reboot we'll be able to go back into the modes tab and set those features up we're going to go ahead and also set up bi-directional d-shot because we're going to be using BLHeli32 ESCs on the latest firmware and motor idle can just stay where it's at we're going to go ahead and save and reboot to the modes tab back in the modes tab here we can now see that we have access to the beeper option and the flip over after crash option so I'm going to go ahead and set the flip over after crash to be on aux two like I said earlier I'm going to bring this slider all the way to the right so now if I use aux two I'm going to have air mode in the down position in the middle position I'm going to have air mode off and in the up position I will have my turtle mode active I'm going to set my beeper to aux three and I'm going to move it all the way to the right because I have my beeper on channel seven which is aux three so now if you hide unused modes you'll see that I have aux one, aux two and aux three selected those are the three switches I'll be using in my radio go ahead and save one last time I have my OSD information all in a dump file and I'll provide you guys with the dump file in the comments if you guys check the comments or in the description of this YouTube video you'll be able to see the dump file that I'm going to provide all of the settings that I customize for the filters and my OSD settings because whenever I'm done with this I'm just going to paste the file into Betaflight and then my dump file will be there setting up all the specific things that are a little bit too time consuming to go through in the motors tab we made sure we are on DShot 300 the next thing is the scary part next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and plug in a battery with a smoke stopper and make sure everything's okay before I plug in get the motor directions and positions all set up in Betaflight this is a smoke stopper available in the Rotorite store at Rotorite.com don't forget to pick one of these up before you build your drone to prevent the fires from happening we got our little red LED there and the moment of truth here we go no fires how about that everything seems to be okay so now we got our smoke stopper plugged in and everything's fine I don't have any issues no warning lights or anything I've got little flashing green lights everywhere blues and reds and greens everything's fine everything looks good to me and I'll see any problems we're going to plug the flight controller back into Betaflight now and then we're going to go ahead and get the motors set up the way they're supposed to be because we have to make sure the motors are all spinning in the correct direction and they are in the correct position depending on where you set your ESC and the direction you turn it these motors might be in the incorrect position and I think if I'm correct this is actually supposed to be back here in the standard configuration so all these motors are out of whack right now and we need to fix all that so we're going to Betaflight and Betaflight's going to fix all those for us if you're running Betaflight 4.3 it's super easy to go right into the motors tab and fix all this stuff go ahead and plug in the drone and go to the motors tab and we're going to go ahead and run the reorder motors first I understand the risks and I'm going to hit start now it's going to spin one of the motors and I'm going to tell it where it is in the configurator here so we are spinning the front left motor so we're going to go ahead and click the front left motor then it's going to switch over to the back left motor so we're going to click that now it's going to switch to the front right motor and we're going to click that then it's going to switch to the rear right motor and we're going to click that and now it knows we're going to go ahead and hit save and now it knows which motor is in which location and it will go ahead and fix it for us automatically so now if I go back to the motors tab and I click on I understand the risks I can spin up motor one and it spins the correct motor spin up number two and it spins the correct motor so all these motors are going to be in the right location and now I'm going to go ahead and set up the motor direction because they're probably spinning the wrong way as well because I didn't even pay attention as to which order I put them in when I solder the wires on so we're going to click motor direction I understand the risks and I'm going to do them individually rather than doing the wizard and I'm just going to click on one here and let's see which direction it's spinning I'm going to put my fingers on it and I'm going to feel which direction it's spinning and this one is rotating in a clockwise orientation which is the correct direction for this motor so the way I try to remember it is I like to have my motors spinning in this orientation I like to remember as this is hugging and this is swimming and hugging is in this orientation so the front and rear of your drone should be motors spinning in this direction hugging is regular orientation and swimming is the reversed orientation and inside beta flight we currently have this set up as regular rotation which is hugging and we want to make sure that our props are spinning in that direction and our motors need to spin in that direction as well so let's go ahead back to the drone and we're going to go ahead and make sure all these motors are spinning in the right orientation so this is motor 2 I'm going to hold down the 2 and it's going to spin for me so this one is also spinning in the correct orientation which is hugging as well so 1 is spinning this way which is correct 2 is spinning this way which is correct let's check out 3 and 4 this is 3 back here wow this is really lucky and we'll go back to 4 and 4 is correct how is that possible that I got I've never built a drone so far where all 4 motors are in the right direction well just in case you got one that's wrong you can use the normal and the reverse buttons to flip flop them and make them correct and then it'll actually make them spin in the opposite direction so I'm just going to for the heck of it just make this one backwards by hitting reverse just so you can see that it now switched directions and now it's spinning in this direction which is wrong if I click the normal button it'll now switch it back to normal and everything's back to normal again and everything's good so once you have all that set you can hit close and it will remember all of your settings and your motors are now spinning in the right direction and they're also in the right position on the drone while all this is happening your VTX is getting extremely hot so I'd recommend putting a fan on it rather than leaving it plugged in like I have for the last 5 minutes over heating so always put a fan plug in a battery on your VTX with these WaxNail and DJI VTX because they get really hot sitting on the bench we're going to go back into Betaflight we're going to paste in the dump file that I have on my computer this is my dump settings from a notepad document that I keep on my desktop and this has all of the settings that I usually update on my drone this should be non-specific to any particular flight controller so that these settings should be able to be used on just about any flight controller and then you just have to make sure you go set up your ports and everything else correctly and paste it into Betaflight and the CLI tab and Troll V to paste and hit enter and then I'm going to type save and hit enter again and then all of my settings now for my PID settings my filters, my OSD tab everything is now filled out the way I like it the only thing you might want to change is the craft name you might not want to have Let's Flare see as your craft name but everything else you can use if you want to have my particular OSD settings in your drone as well this receiver now needs to be bound to my awesome new Rotor Riot AGO1 Gimbal Pro Radio I love this radio master TX-16S with the Rotor Riot AGO1 Gimbal it's so freaking awesome we're going to use this with an ELRS module on the back and we're going to go ahead and set up this receiver and get it ready to bind up to this radio ELRS works a little bit differently than other protocols in the fact that you don't have a button to bind the radio to the drone you end up doing a binding phrase instead so we're going to go ahead and set my binding phrase to this receiver so that it matches up to my radio and then it will just automatically be bound whenever I power it up it's really cool for what I like to do because I do all the cool Rotor Riot projects and a lot of times I'll bring 3 or 4 different radios with me to the film shoot and let's say Bubby doesn't like my little gamepad style radio and he wants to use a bigger radio I can just hand him this one and it'll be bound up to all my drones automatically along with all my other radios and it kind of would be able to have more than one radio bound on how to go through all the steps on setting up an ELRS receiver I'm just going to walk you through the quick steps that I have to go through because I've already done some of that and if you've already got ELRS and you already understand how ELRS works you should have all these files already on your computer I've pretty much already gone through the settings of getting my ELRS firmware on my computer set up with my binding phrase and all the settings that I want my ELRS receiver to be so all I now have to do is turn this drone on let that receiver go into Wi-Fi mode, connect it to my computer and flash the firmware and that receiver will now be set to my radio's settings if you want to know more about ELRS and how to set up your receiver, go check out Joshua Barlow's video he does a great job of explaining everything there is to know about ELRS when I plug in my drone it's going to take about 10 or 15 seconds but this ELRS receiver is blinking a green light slowly right now when it starts to flash green quickly then it's in Wi-Fi mode and I can now connect it to my computer and flash the firmware through the ELRS configurator in Chrome and this is why we mounted our receiver upside down so that we can see that little green light once it starts flashing fast like it is right now I should be able to see it show up under my Wi-Fi settings as ExpressLRS Rx it should automatically redirect me to 10.0.0.1 if it doesn't then you can just type that into your browser now that I'm on the website and connected to a fly controller I can choose the file from my computer and select the right firmware hit update and just like that my receiver is going to be bound to my radio automatically now when I power up I should see a solid green light as it binds up to my radio hey there we go so now when I flip the arm switch hey everything's working nice when everything works see how pretty those lights are who doesn't want lights in their drone come on man so now I can see whether I have the radio settings right just by looking at the LEDs to see which motors are spinning as I pitch back the front ones are going to light up brighter as I pitch forward the back ones are going to light up brighter left and right and if all that's correct then you should have a pretty good experience when you go to fly the drone the only thing left to do is to bind up the WalkSnail VTX to my goggles and all I have to do is press this button to bind to my goggles and the light will go red now it's in binding mode and now we need to press the button on the goggles and when you press that button once the goggles are powered up it will bind to your goggles and you'll be ready to go we're going to put our thermal items we're going to put our top plate on we're going to put our GoPro or action camera mount on and we're going to add a battery pad and a battery strap and that should do it the battery strap that comes with this drone is one of our freebie rotor riot battery straps they're really awesome because they have this gummy silicone that holds onto the battery but in a crash these things might tear so I definitely recommend upgrading to our rotor riot Kevlar battery straps and I typically put it into this end first so that the buckle comes as far in as possible and that's going to help us to lock our battery in nice and tight and then I will put the rest of the battery strap through the hole and just kind of temporarily position it in place and make sure that when I install it onto the drone here it doesn't crush the flight controller and we should have plenty of clearance here to where that shouldn't happen we're going to put our battery lead through the hole and then put our screws into the frame and that should lock it in place we're going to take these 6mm, 8mm M3 screws we're going to add some thread locker to them and lock down our top plate get our thread locker on there and put our top plate on as you're putting them on you want to make sure they're loose at the beginning and then you can crank them all down once all six are in place the way that I've designed this the action camera and the top plate are completely separate so you don't need to pull off the action camera in order to access your electronics if you don't want to alright, number two, three, four five and six it's actually a really good idea to install this first just in case you need to spread these aluminum cage pieces apart to make it fit we're going to go ahead and put some thread locker on our last four remaining screws and we're going to install them into our aluminum cage and our action camera mount once all the screws are in place you can go ahead and crank down all the screws go ahead and crank them down so I made this GoPro mount hollow so that it can take a lot of the impact with the hollow insides of this it has just the right amount of cushion to keep the GoPro's from dying quickly and I have a solid back area here which is also hollow and that keeps the battery from crushing the back screen of the GoPro this mount is making my GoPro's last a whole lot longer so I spent a lot less time and best by claiming warranties just go ahead and cut your battery grip into the right shape to fit into this section right here where the battery goes and put yourself a nice square right in there and that will keep your battery from slipping out of your drone get it about where I want it to be with my finger and then slice it with the razor blade here and we'll get the right shape here all right stick her down there and once you peel off that protective coating it's ready to hold your battery now it's time to add our protective arm skids and add some props and she'll be good to fly what you do is you insert the PET-G piece into the TPU piece and push press it down into place you get that nice satisfying click just make sure the back edge is lined up properly so that everything's nice and flat once you have it like that you can go ahead and slide it on the arm of the drone press it into place a little bit of elbow grease and she locks into place and all your screws line up to the holes just like that it's always a good idea to go ahead and put a zip tie as well right around this section here this is a zip tie slot I tried to do it without a zip tie but I did lose a bunch of these guys these are a lot of fun to skid on I really enjoy these it makes your arms last a lot longer and they're really fun to skid around the parking lot on that when you do come into a crash your antennas are never going to get damaged these antennas are out of the way of the props if a prop does manage to get bent and hit this thing it redeflects it back upwards again and keeps it from damaging your antennas since I've been running this antenna design right now I'm flying the HQ juicy J37 props they just have the most durability out of any other prop that I've used so far and they are my favorite right now when you put your props on make sure they're oriented in this direction I have them set up to motors in is what we call it or props in and that is the regular configuration just make sure your props are oriented in this direction so that they spin in the inward direction the one piece we didn't use so far is this receiver plate and that is used for either analog installation or pretty much any other type of video transmitter you might use that you might need that for I just included it just in case I'm going to go ahead and pull out our motor prop nuts from the bags that came with the motors and install them on the props careful if you're going to use a drill for this because you can cut your hand really easily I'm just really used to the drill and I'm too lazy to use a hand wrench so we're going to go ahead and crank them down so when I mount my battery I make sure to pull the battery strap really tight and I do it in this direction because when I go to remove the battery later it makes it a lot easier to get the battery off if you're pulling the Velcro in this direction this is a toilet tank mounting battery system you can also run your battery in the other orientation if you don't like toilet tank it will run this way with two straps definitely flies better with all the center of gravity locked in the middle there it keeps the battery lead away from the props and out of harm's way and it also keeps your battery from crushing your GoPro because it now can't slide forward because the strap is preventing it also preventing it from getting ejected out the back which is another huge problem with regular mounted batteries I don't eject batteries anymore I don't crush GoPro's anymore and I have a much better flying experience because the center of gravity is better so that's why I decided to go with toilet tank battery mounting let's go ahead and plug this baby in and see if she'll fly man that sounds good sounds good I love the way a fresh build sounds I hope you enjoyed this video I hope it taught you a couple things if you learned something along the way if you liked this video make sure you hit the like button click the subscribe button if you're not already subscribed to the Road to Riot channel thanks for watching guys I'm Let's Fly RC and we'll see you next time on Road to Riot