Had a pretty rough crash through a tree yesterday and ended up losing my FPV camera in the process. The quad stood up to the crash just fine, but some of the ESC and receiver wires in the front took some damage. If you look close enough you can see the white receiver wire got ripped out of the connector which was also broken. The ESC wires were a little beat up, but nothing major. I don't know if it will show in the picture, but there is a leaf/tree stain on the pins going down the left side of the board.
Since I lost the camera, and over the past few crashes the ESC wires have started to look a little mangled, I decided it was time to redo the build and hide more of the wires. So first came the disassembly. Boring process so I didn't take any pictures along the way. Once I got the Naze off the quad, I went to wash off the leaf/tree stain and found a nice little crack in the board. Guess I hit the tree harder than I thought. It's on a port that's not used, so hopefully this won't affect me in any way, but I won't know until I get it back in the air. But you can visible see the crack and bend in the board.
So since I lost my little FPV camera, and my FC got cracked, I decided it was time to rethink my FPV gear and add some type of board protection. I ordered a FT952 transmitter and I'll be using one of the micro FPV cameras from getfpv.com, just not sure which one yet. I'll also be cutting a CF plate to cover the FC that will double as a mount for the receiver and FPV gear. Still need to figure out a design for the plate and printed parts to mount the camera.
I can't remember if I ever took pictures of the wiring on this thing, and if I did it didn't have the motors attached, so here it is. I didn't want to remove the motor wires from the ESCs if possible so I could just swap the parts over to a new PDB (thanks to OSH Park saying there was an error in the manufacturing process I had 5 extra PDB laying around).
And this is what the nest of wires looks like once separated from the PDB.
Since I no longer wanted to have the ESC signal wires sticking out the front of the quad anymore, I decided to solder some short straight pins to the ESC signal pads in the front of the PDB. I flipped them over so the longer end went through the holes and the shorter end was between the PDB and the frame. I then cut the long ends flush with the PDB and soldered them in place. I did this so I could fit all of the wires between the frame and PDB. Once this was done I then took the old wiring harness I made and removed one connector from one end and soldered the wires directly to the pins on the PDB and slid heatshrink over the connections. Other header pins and voltage regulator were also soldered on at this time.
Now the fun part, soldering on the ESC power and signal wires to the new PDB. This was an absolute pain, but with enough patients it finally came together. The only difference between this and the original are the ESC signal wires that go to the FC are soldered directly to the pins on the PDB.
Now I needed to get everything in place before I could install the frame. The nice thing about my little bridge for the battery strap is it holds the ESCs in place so I can mount the frame easier. With the ESCs held tightly under the bridge all of the wires can be routed out of the way and the frame can be mounted.
And the frame is finally mounted again. You can see the 6 pin connector coming up through the left side of the hole and both front motor wires are routed down the right side of the hole. This was done since the 6 pin connector once connected to the FC sits extremely close to the frame on the left side and there isn't any room for the wires. But both sets of motor wires fit nicely down the right side. It's finally starting to look nice again. If anyone is wondering where I got the black rubber bands, it came from the hair tie section of Walmart and the pack of 500 was $.97. These little things have been fantastic on this build.
And it's finally back together. Everything fits great and no wires are pinched. I forgot to remove the receiver wires and solder new ones on when I had to board off since the power and ground wires have been sliced into, but that can wait for the next time I go to work on it. I'm still waiting on some XT30 connectors to replace the JST connector I had on there before.
And one last shot to show how much room I don't have to work with on this thing. With the current equipment I have installed I don't think it would be possible for me to make this frame any smaller.
