Meet Napkin, my new super light FPV quad. Making it was a test of patience and my soldering skills.
Another one?
A week or so ago, I was flying Ripley with all of it’s brand new FPV gear strapped on. First of all, that was super duper fun. I then decided to shoot a gap may just a bit too small as fast as I could make the thing go. Whoops.
No big deal, though. Fixing it was just a matter of ordering a new part plus a bit of soldering, but hey, since this thing was so much fun, why not order a few extra parts and make a second one?
So that’s what I did. I ordered the lightest chassis (that wasn’t plastic) that I could find and another Pico kit for FPV and waited. This time, though, I wanted to try things out that I wasn’t willing to on Ripley. I wanted to remove the need for the second battery and I wanted the wires to be much much shorter.
Tiny soldering
In order to avoid a second battery, I needed (I think) to get a 5v step up that just converts the power fro 3 to 5v. The thing is 30% connector so I removed the connector. This means I had some seriously tiny (and somewhat frustrating) soldering to do.
Not only was the soldering there a bit maddening, but shortening other wires and connectors for the transmitter and camera ended up being a little tricky. If it’s still rocking after a few days of testing, I’ll probably make similar changes to Ripley.
The results
I think it came out pretty nicely. It’s incredibly light. From the short tests I’ve done on it so far, it flies really nicely. Will definitely be flying as fast as possible with it this weekend.