Flight
Xaircraft Hexacopter
This is my Xaircraft Hexacopter. It is made of an extremely rigid and durable plastic composite with fiberglass panels. The frame is very light-weight and the kit includes many parts and mounts. The kit not only includes the oversize landing skids that are great for FPV, but it also includes regular claw shaped landing gear for each arm of the frame. With the claw shaped landing gear, the supplied yellow foam ball can be placed along a fiber rod between the two front arms in order to help maintain orientation. The kit also comes with a mounting panel and plenty of silicon standoffs for mounting your flight controller with. However, the hole spacing for the standoffs is 50mm and most 50mm flight controller boards have 45mm hole spacing, therefore I had to mount the board atop a dense 1/4″ piece of foam using zip-ties. The supplied motor mounts have both 16mm and 19mm spacing with M3x6 bolts for mounting various different motors. I used the 150W 1200kV Turnigy L2210C motors which fit perfectly into the mounts. These motors work excellent with 25A Redbrick speed controllers and 9x5x3 props. I went through three battery packs in about 20 minutes and the motors and escs were barely warm in 60 degree weather. Using a 3300mAh 40C LiPo I get over eight minutes of flight time even while powering 36 red LEDs and a 5.8 GHz 200mW video transmitter. It has no problem lifting a 5000mAh LiPo and a GoPro HD Hero with the protective poly-carbonate skeleton enclosure.
$15 DIY three-axis GoPro gimbal
Assembled Xaircraft Hexa Frame
Turnigy L2210C 150W 1200kV Brushless Outrunner and GWS 9x5x3 / 9x5x3R props. Black aluminum alloy prop adapters are included with each motor as well as 3 pairs of 3.5mm gold bullets and a mounting bracket with bolts. The GWS props also come with shaft adapters for the prop adapter.
25A Red Brick ESCs with the red heat shrink removed and replaced with 30mm black heat shrink.
MWC Crius SE Flight Controller mounted on top of dense 1/4″ foam.
5.8 GHz 200mW video transmitter for FPV with standard antenna. Input to the tx is wired to a futaba connector with terminals for ground, audio, and video.
My TH9x receiver, MWC Crius SE Flight controller and 5.8 GHz transmitter are all mounted to the supplied mounting plate from the Xaircraft Hexa kit.
The Xaircraft Hexa Frame comes with a battery tray and two Velcro battery straps that attach to the loading pipes.
The included fiberglass landing skids are hollow with very thin walls. The pressure of snapping the rods into the skids was enough to slightly fracture them so I replaced them with 5/16″ dowel rods covered with black 10mm heat shrink.
Each leg of the landing skids is lined with 9 Red LEDs.
Cables for FPV and Telemetry including mini USB 5v charging cable to futaba, 4 conductor 2.5mm composite to futaba (Video, Audio, Ground) and Bluetooth Telemetry Module.
Simple FPV ground station with 5.8 GHz Receiver and a 4.3″ TFT LCD. Both the receiver and monitor are re-wired with a futaba connector for ground, power, and video.
Plano four pistol case for charging, FPV, and radio gear.
Completed Frame with fixed GoPro Mount
