With the weather warming up I started looking into building a larger sized quad to fly outside. I decided I didn’t want to go straight to a full sized quadcopter with 5″ props which is the standard for FPV freestyle. I wanted to be able to fly comfortably in my yard, so that I could get more time in during the week, rather than always having to go to a field or park. So I settled on a 3″ build plan, because I’d heard that building for smaller props than that wasn’t as good of an experience.

Build a quad from scratch was a daunting experience because of all of the different pieces that needed to be selected and work together. You have to decide on a frame, what size of motors, the camera, the video transmitter (VTX), the receiver, the antennas, the props, the electronic speed controllers (ESCs), and the flight controller. Each component has an impact on the others too. There’s the obvious factor of the weight of the different components versus the thrust that the motors and props will generate, but also just compatibility between the amount of space in the frame for components and the mounting pattern versus the size of the flight controller and other electronics.

I started with the motors and got some advice from some local pilots to look at 1407’s as a good size for flying 3″ props. Then I used a site called RotorBuilds to figure out the rest of the parts list. It’s a site where people post their quadcopter builds. Some with detailed articles and photo albums of the step-by-step and others with just a short description of how it flies. But all of them have a parts list with links to vendors on them. So I ended up searching the site by the size of motors I was looking at building with and getting ideas from that on what parts I was going to buy. One build in particular I ended up being interested in was a 3″ Xilo Phreak because the guy mentioned how durable it was, and I figured as someone just starting out that getting a quad that could handle some hard crashes would be a good idea. I also liked that the Phreak frame had replaceable arms, so I figured in a worse case scenario if I crashed and broke one I wouldn’t have to rebuild the whole baseplate.

For the flight controller, I ended up going with the one mentioned in that RotorBuilds parts list. The HGLRC stack came as a combo with a four-in-one ESC and a VTX so I didn’t have to worry about them working together and the price on the full stack was just a little cheaper than what I’d have spent on separate boards.

When looking at cameras, the major factor in picking one was that I wanted to do HD capture from this quad, and a 3″ build though is too small to carry a GoPro. Plus there was the fact that I didn’t own a GoPro and I didn’t feel like spending a couple hundred dollars to get one. So I had only two choices: a RunCam Split or a Caddx Turtle. Both of these are camera and HD capture board pairs where the camera signal passes through the board first for recording, then goes to the flight controller to get the onscreen display overlay, and lastly goes to the VTX. This allows capturing HD quality video to an SD card on the quad without any analog transmission, but adds some latency to the signal. Latency is a big point of contention among pilots. It is the amount of lag between the camera on the quad capturing an image and that image showing in the pilot’s goggles. Some people seem to be able to notice and be bothered by tiny amounts of latency in that setup, and try to stay away from these types of split capture boards. I’ve never really noticed a problem with it though. I picked the Caddx because it came in black and was a slightly newer design.

The receiver and antennas were that last parts and those were pretty much a given. Since my radio uses the FrSky protocol, and I wanted telemetry on the quad, I only had one option in the R-XSR. For the antennas I had an omni and patch Axii on my goggles already so I got another omni with the same polarization for the quad build.

I was doing all of this near Easter so many of the sites were running sales. I ended up getting most of the parts from GetFpv.com. They didn’t have the receiver in stock though, so I ordered that plus a couple of batteries and a smoke stopper from RaceDayQuads.com. Then I just had to wait for everything to show up.

Here’s the final parts list:

Building a Quad – Picking the Parts
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