Preparing for the maiden flight. Part 1.

Before adding a radio Rx I have spent some time looking closely to this frame, and there are some important details.

There are connectors on both sides of the frame 

 That are exposed to impacts and dust and mud and to the water you can often find on the grass at the flying field, when you are in a wet day, or in winter. Because of rain.

Also the cam has all the pcb exposed so again I see a potential issue here if water or moisture or an object comes here inside damaging the board or the connectors mentioned above. Moisture may cause a short circuit and mud may break the same electronic parts. Also an object may damage during landing or during a crash the components.

 The lower face of the frame has holes. These are good for cooling the boards but they are also windows open to, again, mositure, objects, mud, dust. Before flying this quad I will cover with some paper tape.

 

The arms too have the motor cables on the lower parts. This is good from a look perspective but I prefer to have them on the top to have them always well visible and avoid that water starts causing problems on the contacts. On these wires we have the battery power going to the motors so a loosely or dirty contact may cause power to be missing on a motor. I would prefer to be sure moisture can't enter the connectors.  

I'm curious about what are those BATT pads intended for. I suppose it may be to get direct battery voltage for powering leds. I will need to check:

It would be good if leds would have come pre added to the frame at the factory.

I like the way the camera has been made tunable from the angle perspective. I think this will help also in case of impacts, so that the camera can shift behind and avoid breaking.

 

It is interesting to note that there are 4 o rings between the CF plate and the camera, to help absorbing impacts and vibrations I think. This is a good idea. A pretty small detail I was happy to notice. Look at the screws in the picture below.

The model has pretty nice canopy that can be removed, and put back in place fixing it using a rubber band available in the frame box. To help in doing this there is a place on the back on the canopy to keep the rubber band in place and there are "hooks" on the frame to keep the same rubber band in the same place.

The rubber band in the box:

 

 And the hooks on the frame to keep it I mentioned above.

 The canopy seems to be made of an impact resistant plastic. It is nice with its shark like smile :).

 

On the upper part there are other drawings

 I'm guessing if I can have other canopies with a fluo color so that it is more evident when I fall in the grass or on mud at the flying field. A color like fluo green or yellow or whatever may make it more visible.

Leds:

This model comes with a CAM to fly in FPV. Well that's ok but as I want to try to fly VLOS, not in FPV as well, I absolutely need to add some leds in order to understand while in the air where the model is facing to. As I mentioned above there are maybe pads on the single PCB that I can use to get the power for the leds. I would put red on the back and green on the front. There are some holes on the arms I can use to put leds on my own.

Some quads have a pcb that with a micro switch allows to turn on/off the navigation leds in order to use it VLOS or BLOS (fpv). This may be a good idea. This way I may be able to turn on/off not only the switch but also the vtx in case I fly this model not in FPV mode.