Continuing from part 1, let see how I managed to get through the hardest part of building a quadcopter. Soldering is one of the hardest parts, especially if you don’t have much experience. As according to tutorial, one should first solder ESC to the power distribution board (PDB).

Soldering ESC onto PDB

But what tutorial does not show is that ESC should also be prepared to be attached to the motors. You need to attach connectors to the opposite side of ESC, the one that is pointing toward the motors. I did not do this immediately and therefore proceeded with mounting the PDB onto the frame, which made it in the end very awkward to solder connectors on ESCs.

The next thing to keep in mind is that when cutting the wires of ESC, you should left some space in case you want to position ESC further away from PDB, as this picture shows.

Attention! And now the most important part. If you do not want to short circuit the ESC, than carefully read this. Insulation of connectors on ESC side is very important! Otherwise if connectors touch each other while motors are spinning, ESC can blow up with distinct crackling noise and white smoke. This of course happened to me, as I was making some initial tests without proper insulation on connectors. You can see the result of this unfortunate accident here:

After we have finished with ESCs, we can mount the top of the frame which will hold the OpenPilot CC3D Mini flight controller.

And that’s it. Join me next time to see how I made a custom housing out of ice cream box to protect flight controller.