PsyBorg

Wake up! Time to fly!
Hey... In the second to last picture.... The upper right hand esc ground connection.... Is that a loose strand of wire sitting between the ground and the capacitor? I don't see it when I zoom in on your first pic of the same board. I would hate to see you power that up and pop something if it is a piece of wire that got loose from some where. The weird angle of the shiny line caught my eye when everything else is square to the board.
 

Snarls

Gravity Tester
Mentor
Just checked and it was just a stray piece of hot glue/foam board. I did a continuity test last night and found a connection between the battery negative and the frame. Turns out it is because I have the vTX sma pigtail secured directly to the frame. This is how Armattan intends it to be and others say it is ok to have the frame grounded, but I don't know how I should feel about it.
 

Snarls

Gravity Tester
Mentor
Here are some pics of the finished build.

I thought I had finished everything, but then I had problems with two things: the battery pigtail and the vTx. The battery pigtail reached the battery just fine, except I forgot to check what position the XT60 on the battery is facing when I place the battery the way I want it. It turned out the + on the battery XT60 wanted to line up with the - on the pigtail and vice versa. I then soldered the pigtail on in the opposite orientation only to discover it was too short. So I soldered it on with a longer wire and it worked, but had a tendency to drift into the prop plane. Right before conceding and going with the popular method of a longer pigtail through the top plate, I came up with the idea of restraining the pigtail against the frame using a zip tie between the XT60 and the plate on top of the rear arms. This actually seems to work well and should also help relieve some stress on the pigtail (the zip tie securing the pigtail to the PDB had to be removed).

Next I had a problem with the vTx placement. The length of the coax pigtail on the vTx placed the vTx right above the FC. This means there was a stack consisting of the PDB, the FC, and the vTx. Well the Rooster has a dropped top plate so I ended up with no space to fit one of the battery straps. My solution was to shorten the vTx pigtail. It is a Mach 2 vTx which originally had a UFL connector between the coax and vTx, but that broke so I had the coax directly soldered. Shortening the coax to a smaller length and soldering it to the vTx was then not too big of an problem.

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Maiden was successful and these Emax Avan props sound pretty good so far. Now its on to tuning which I am covering in this thread: https://forum.flitetest.com/index.php?threads/plasmatree-pid-analyzer.53848/#post-415240
 

PsyBorg

Wake up! Time to fly!
We have video of this in the air yet? That is a sexy build and I wanna see it fly. See if its as graceful and elegant as it looks.
 

Snarls

Gravity Tester
Mentor
We have video of this in the air yet? That is a sexy build and I wanna see it fly. See if its as graceful and elegant as it looks.

Only in my backyard testing a tune. Its super smoother, but not graceful when you have to turn around every two seconds
 

Snarls

Gravity Tester
Mentor
I can say that so far I am really liking these Emax Avan 6" props. They are meant for long range efficiency, but for general 6" freestyle they are great. I am experiencing very minimal propwash oscillation with them. Vibes on the quad are low, and I am able to punch out smoothly no problem.

So far for 6" props I've tried old DAL 6045, HQ Durables 6x4.5, Gemfan Flash 6042 and now Emax Avan Longrange 6". I'd rate them worst to best going from left to right. That said, I'm not sure how much the new Rooster frame has influenced my experience with the Avans. I'll have to try the Gemfan Flash again on the new build.