Gideon Tong's Latest

If you don't remember my last blog post or YouTube video, you can check the last post. However, to summarize, I discovered that it would be extremely difficult to connect the ESC to the battery connector on the PDB so I had to devise a solution. What I ended up doing was super hacky. I took some cables and simply wired it to the other side. Since I also did this over a week ago, I don't actually remember nor have the patience to find photos in a huge photo library. The video link is below though. Fun fact: this is the first video that I ever recorded at night, while all the ones before this were actually recorded in the afternoon. At first, I wanted to quickly remove the plastic on the top of the ESC. However, it has labeled for me which cables need to be wired to which motors, so I left it on just in case I forgot or misplaced my printed diagram. In addition, all the ends of the cables had solder already on them as they were 'pre-soldered,' so what I did was str...

I didn't expect the ESC connectors being on the opposite side of the battery connector to be a problem. In fact, I intentionally placed it in this direction so the cables could be wired accordingly. However, now that I've realized it's a mistake, I had to figure out how I was going to wire it up. As you can see in the photo below, this illustrates my predicament because the cables barely reach far enough, and even though they do, that makes it very hard to solder them together with no way to mount it down and no slack. I did try certain things like bend the cable around and get it to reach, but it is extremely difficult to get them into the placement that I want, and therefore instead of taking a risk and accidentally burning my hand by moving the soldering iron too much or burning other components that are already mounted to the frame of the quadcopter, like the ESC. A photo of how the XT60 connector is on the opposite side. As you can see on the right side o...

Dear past me, I guess... I don't think I would have made it this far successfully. I find it kind of funny how much I brushed off freshman year - big, big mistake. I'm already paying for it - I don't even need to look at college applications to know that. Everyone older than me tells me not to worry about college. Everyone my age tells me not to worry about college. Everyone younger than me tells me not to worry about college. Maybe they're right, but it's like a snowball effect. If I don't do well in high school, I won't get into a good college. If I don't get into a good college, I might have a harder time finding a job. And so on, and so forth. On the flip side, there's plenty of good opportunities even for people who go to community college, or people who don't go to college at all. It's very true that college is not the end all be all solution, but for me, sometimes it really does seems like it is. I've... made friends I guess. M...

In this post, the goal was to solder a good connection between each of the four motors and the electronic speed controller. The motors I picked were the Racerstar 2205-2300KV motors, since they are quite cheap and deliver really good performance for the money. The ESC I picked was a 4 in 1 20A ESC, also from Racerstar, in order to save space. However, I did have some troubles with this ESC, as you will see in my description below the video. Even though this was not my first time soldering, the job I did of soldering was so poor it admittedly may have as well been my first time soldering. As you can see in the photo below, the first motor I hooked up had major inconsistencies in my soldering and I kept forgetting to put the heat shrink on before soldering, so I would solder two of the cables together and then realize that I had forgotten to add a little bit of heat shrink, and sometimes when I would remember I would cut a little bit too much of heat shrink, as you can see in t...

Hey there! Today in this blog post, since they coincide with my videos, will be the 7th vlog/video of my YouTube channel: In order to keep my videos short and sweet, that means I do less in every video, which has the indirect effect of making my blog posts shorter now. First off, I started with the motors mounted to the frame. It looked like this:  A photo of what the frame looked like after the motors were mounted. There was an interesting method to screwing the frame together. These screws don't always tighten together, and they're not really screws on the frame. They're more like sticks holding the frame together for support, because they slide right through, although some of the frame holes are a little too small, so you really have to push in order to make the screw fit through. A photo of the frame with the ESC mounted. I then mounted the ESC to the top. Something I found interesting was how much extra cabling I had between the ESC and the motors....

In today's post, I decided to screw on the Racerstar 2204-2300KV motors onto my quadcopter frame. This took much longer than I originally anticipated, even more so since I made a mistake halfway through and had to take out one of the motors, since I screwed it into the wrong place. The YouTube link is linked below. The motors screw in using an included screw kit, which are hex screws, and the size of the Allen key I used was S2 T10, as it is photographed below. S2 T10: size of the Allen key I used. Below is the photograph of the screws after I screwed in the first motor. These motors stick out slightly, and that makes me worried that I might break them by flipping the quadcopter upside down. By adding the motors to the frame of my quadcopter, I am finally building something that is starting to take shape. The Racerstar motors use hex screws. I know that there is not much to say about these motors, so while you look at yet another photograph below of the screwe...