This turned out to be much more UAV than we needed. Eventually we built a much smaller quad that met our needs a lot better.
This obviously needs a bit of work to be flight ready again but it's got good guts. Everything is soldered, it uses a Vulcan PDB w/ an Attopilot 90A battery monitor...
So just did another test double checking everything. 3 minutes at 9A according to the AttoPilot (wish I had a better way to measure current) and it throttles itself down to 5A? Entirely possible I'm testing this all wrong though. I'm going to reach out to KDE tomorrow and see what they say!
There's essentially no flex and it's surprisingly rigid. The motor mounts are great but one thing I didn't like much about the Vulcan UAV was running the wires through the arms. PITA. It would have been nice to have some instructions or at least a recommended order in which to do things.
As for...
All I did was get some appropriate spacers from McMaster and the proper length M4 screws. It was super easy to do and luckily I had enough slack wire I didn't have to take things all apart!
What confuses me though is that I'm going by KDEs specs and they still shutdown. http://www.kdedirect.com/KDE4014XF380.html Says that the 4014 at 6S with 17x5.8 props with draw 23A at 100%. Shouldn't the 35+ A ESCs be plenty of headroom considering they'll mostly be at 60-70%?
I do and I'll give it a shot tonight but from what eCalc says (not that I remotely trust it but..) 4S with 17" props would put me back at 80-90% thrust.
I recently built a Vulcan UAV Black Widow with KDE 4014's and 15" props. At the time I was using Spider Simon K 40A ESCs. I was having trouble lifting a 5D3 and gimbal comfortably (around 80-85% throttle) and so after some modifications to the motor mounts I switched to some 17" props thinking...
So if I understand correctly for those of us running 6S systems with an AttoPilot battery monitor and BEC powering the Pixhawk we’d run the positive/negative control loop to the BEC?
Thanks for all the help! It's refreshing to see a company investing in great customer service.