How to Build a Brushed Quadcopter: A Step by Step Guide

The quadcopter is an interesting thing of technology. Most of the peoples use it for the purpose of hobby, surveillance, photography etc. The quadcopters are available in various sizes and mostly used for outdoor application. The brushed quadcopter is the rare one which is used as an indoor quadcopter.

If you’re a drone hobbyist and love to make creative drones, then this Robu is for you!

In this blog, we are going to learn, How to Build a Brushed Quadcopter. Let start from the parts of this drone.

Introduction to Basic Parts

• Mini Drone frame- Here we use lightweight 95 mm brushed drone frame. It has 4 arms to hold the brushed motor and chassis to fix the flight controller. It uses the material of carbon fibre.

• Brushed motors & Propellers- Here, we use 55mm Blade Propeller+615 CW & CCW Coreless Brushed motor for the mini drone. The rated RPM for the brushed Dc motor is 60000.

 

 

• Brushed flight controller- Here we are using latest version of F3 EVO flight control Support 6 axis aircraft. It is 32-bit brushed flight controller based on SP Racing F3 Evo firmware. It supports 1S ( 4.2V ) and 2S ( 8.4V ) power supply, 2S can bring you more breathtaking flight.

• LIPO battery- In mini drone can operate with 1 cell battery. Here, we have uses the 1000 mah 3.7v LIPO battery to get flight time up to 10 minutes.

• RC Transmitter and Receiver- To operate this drone, we are using FS-i6 s Fly sky RC transmitter & receiver. With this flight controller, we can use DSM, PPM or SBUS receiver.

Now, let’s start the procedure of making mini Quad copter.

Step 1- Assembly of brushed quadcopter frame.

This frame comes with separate parts. Kindly fix it properly with given nuts standoffs.

Step-2- Fixing of Brushed Motors

Install the brushed motors in the holders provide on arm. In a quadcopter, we need 2 counter-clockwise (CCW) and 2 clockwise motors (CW).

Here, Red and the Blue wire is CW rotation motor & Black and the White wire is CCW rotation motor. The polarity of the wires is as follows:-

• RED + (positive) | WHITE + (positive)
• BLUE - (negative) | BLACK - (negative)

Make sure that all the motors are at the same level. Then, we attach the CW Propeller to CW motor and CCW propeller to the CCW motor.

Step 3 -fixing of Flight Controller 

To fix the flight controller, remove the film from the DST tape provided with the flight controller .

Then place the DST tape on to the back of the flight controller board and press it. Then remove the film from the other side and fix the flight controller board on the chassis properly.

Step 4- Connection of Motors with Flight Controller

Here, we use 1234 quadcopter X configuration of cleanflight and made the connection of motors with the flight controller. Also, soldered the battery connector to the pad. Here, we connected the motor as,

• M1: clockwise brushed motor : red (+), Black(-)
• M2: counterclockwise brushed motor : white (+), Black(-)
• M3: counterclockwise brushed motor : white (+), Black(-)
• M4: clockwise brushed motor : red (+), Blue(-)

Step 5- Connect the Receiver

With this flight controller you can use SBUS, PPM or DSM receiver. Here, I am using PPM receiver. As per the below image, the PPM receiver is connected to the UART 2 pins. In Cleanflight you need to enable UART2 as Serial RX.

The connections for PPM and SBUS are,

• Gnd to Gnd
• 5V to 5V
• PPM signal to Rx2 and keep the TX2 pin unconnected.

If you are using DSM Receiver:

• Solder the DSM plus lead to 3.3V, the minus lead to Gnd and the signal lead to RX3,
• In Cleanflight you need to enable UART3 as Serial RX.

Step 6- Configuration of the Flight Controller

Here, we are using Cleanflight and Zadig software to configure our FC. You can download the software from the below link,

• Cleanflight - Configurator
• Zadig USB driver

Kindly install both the software properly and open the cleaflight configurator now, 

1. Plug your F3 EVO_Brush board onto your computer. Click on firmware flasher, select the flight controller and its latest firmware version and load firmware [online].

 

2. open the Zadig software, select the option and tick list all devices.

3.  Select STM32 Bootloader from the drop down, choose WinUSB as
the replacement and click Replace Driver.

4. Now, go back to Cleanflight and click on firmware flasher and wait the ST DFU DRIVER Automatic installation. It’s successfully flashed when you see the DFU port on the Up right corner.

After flashing the firmware, remove the soldered jumper and reboot the flight controller board. Then go to the mode tab and setup the arm switch and the flight modes. After this disconnect the USB cable and connect the battery and now your drone is ready to fly!

Hope you have enjoyed learning this tutorial for your indoor brushed quadcopter. We hope, this tutorial is the perfect option for starting your own mini quadcopter.

Tags : F3 brushed flight controller , mini drone , mini quadcopter