Starting to work on Arducopter

Now that the OpenROV Cockpit 1.0 beta has been released, and since I don’t envision diving in a lake before the temperature goes back above zero degrees Celsius, I decided to start, finally, building my Arducopter, that was sitting in the drawer since two years almost.

I started assembling it one step at a time, and so far I assembled the motor’s arms and the power distribution board.

Power Distribution Board

I started off with soldering the PDB, as I knew it would have been painful since I’m still getting experienced with soldering. And in fact I had to de-solder and re-solder a few times because I screwed some joints.

Jjust to get a taste of the assembly here is a quick rendering of the timelapse of that assembly part.

The most painful part was soldering the battery wires to the board, since they didn’t fit in the holes. Also I soldered the ESC cables directly to the board, as I couldn’t get the dean connectors to solder on it. But apparently mine was a pretty old kit, and lately soldering the ESC wires to the board became the recommended solution.

And at the end it didn’t come out too bad.

Motor’s Arms

That step was a bit easier: no soldering involved, just some cable routing and screwdriver work. And again a quick rendering of the timelapse of that phase:

Here the final result with the 4 arms nicely aligned and ready for the next step.

Next step

Next step, hopefully this weekend, would be assembling the frame of the copter and maybe setting up also the electronics.

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