Syma X5 low cost low weight FPV Setup Extended

Since my super cheap mini cctv 205MT 600TVL finally came in the mail yesterday I had to build this! I also wanted all the electronics fit into the case and only let the antenna hang out! With this opportunity to rip the whole thing apart again I did some photo's myself to show you exactly what I did and where! Hope you enjoy the look and maybe build one yourself. If you do so please leave a comment, link or pictures of your work, that would be great!

Okay, I'm gonna divide this into three parts:

• The rip up (you could call it an disassembly instruction)
• The old setup (short explanation and pics since the first Syma post covers that up)
• The new setup (new camera, same old transmitter but all in one casing)

Now let's start tearing things apart:

The rip up

Starting point: No Prop guards and removed battery cap.

First remove each pair of screws of the outer cap-holder (4x), the four inner screws and the two at the battery connector.

Now you should be able to gently push the top-cap off the main frame. This is all you need to do if you plan to set it up for FPV. But I like disassembling things so I kept going :)

I first removed all four props which are hold by one screw each positioned in the center.

I then flipped the X5 to the back and removed the motor-cap's by unscrewing three screws on each arm. Each motor-cap can now easily be taken off (4x). Look how dirty the gear is, I will have to clean it. That's maybe the only major drawback of this Toy, the upper side is covered well but the bottom isn't protected from dirt at all.

 The actual motor holders are now just pressed in so you can simply lift them up gently (4x). The Led "strips" are only hold by one clamp in the middle, just push them out with your finger nails or something flat and lead them through the tiny hole where the cables come from.

The last step to get all the wired electronics out is to unscrew the three screws that are holding the main board. And there you go, a fully unscrewed X5 wohoo :D

So now lets so some photos of the old setup:

 

 

The old setup

These were the parts that I used:

step up 5V module

TX5813 with soldered 5.8 GHz
Cloverleaf antenna and connectors












5V Power supply Y-cable

808 #16 v3 Keychain camera
without battery and case
but with some tape to hold the lens



The only thing that was actually in the casing was the step up module with wires leading out to the TX and the camera. That worked pretty well and didn't came in the way of the propellers but I wanted something neater looking and even more lightweight:

 

 

The new setup

 That's where my finally arrived super tiny cctv cam (10€) comes in :)

I also soldered the 5V step up module directly to the X5 mainboard to save weight and space.

To fit the camera inside the case I cut out a small hole to the front and fixed the cam with some tape and foam.

The main wiring stays the same so I fiddled everything inside the case and cut a very small hole for the antenna to come out of the side. And that's it! Simply screwed the upper cap back on and did a short test if the video module is sending and it did wohoo :D



Hope you enjoy this build, as always: if you have any questions just use the comment section below!

Cheerio

Syma X5 low-cost, low weight, high-res FPV setup

After several crashes of the big quad because of my inexperience I wanted something small, cheap and indestructible! The Syma X5 was the perfect fit for a trainer so I bought it off from ebay for about 60€. Hundreds of flights later it's still working as it should! I even went out and put a 808 #16 v3 Keychain camera on it and it was able to fly quite well.

That gave me the idea that without all the Keychain cam's battery and casing it should be possible to add a fpv transmitter as payload without increasing the total weight! As I searched through different kinds of transmitters I found one extremely cheap and lightweight FPV-TX, the Boscam TX5813 Module! These come as an all in one chip with soldering pins but without surrounding PCB which makes it extremely lightweight (~ 2g). The range is fairly small but will exceed the range of the RC Transmitter of the X5 without a problem.

ISO

Side



Front

This post will only explain the "flying part" part of the FPV Setup, the ground station (Receiver and Screen) is not part of it (maybe I will cover it in a later post).

So here's the setup

• Syma X5 (don't buy the X5c version, you can spend your money better than that) ~ 60€

• Keychain cam 808 #16 v3 ~40€

alternative:
Keychain cam 808 hq30 ~33€
or any 5V Video Live Output cam like this ~ 10€

• one TX5813 Module from here or elsewhere ~8€

• the cheapest step-up 5V module you can find like this ~ 2-3€

500mA should be enough to power the transmitter and the cam

• DIY Cloverleaf 5.8 GHz Antenna, here is an awesome tutorial ~ 3-4€

• Some HK 750mAh 1S battery's from here ~3€/each

 That's it! So in total your would have to pay 26€ without shipping for the cheapest setup and only 50€ with a real HD ready recording function! Since many RC-hobbyists already own a keychain cam or a 5V cam the actual transmitter mod would cost only 16€ :O

Despite the low price you can experience the full DIY feeling, which includes soldering, bending measuring and all that fun stuff :P

Tools and consumables needed

• a soldering iron
• screwdriver
• some cables to connect things ;) about 10cm each
• optional: pinheader and crimps, but you can just solder it directly
• a magnifying glass
• a tweezer

To build the Cloverleaf Antenna more materials are needed, just follow the link!


Step by Step

Before starting to unscrew the X5 the FPV-Transmitter TX5812 needs to be soldered:

If you want to change the Band of your TX follow this tutorial.

This TX5813 .pdf should give you all the information needed. It includes the pinout names and an application diagram.

First solder your cloverleaf antenna to pin 9 (GND), 10 (ANT), 11 (GND) as shown in the application diagram (the three pins up right when looking on the chips front). Make sure to not short the ANT Pin with the metal sheet.

Next solder the red wire to Pin 4 (VCC), one black wire to each GND Pin (3 and 5) and one yellow wire to Pin 1 (Video). Solder the other end of the red and one of the black wires to the corresponding output pins of your 5V step-up module. To power your camera solder one more red cable to your step up modules output pins (long enough to reach the cam from the inner X5 casing).

The yellow and the other black cable can be soldered directly to the matching wires of your camera, the red wire coming from the step up module as well.

Now open the Syma X5 by unscrewing each pair of the outer screws (don't unscrew the three screws under the propellers, those aren't necessary) on each arm. Now unscrew the 4 screws under the landing gear. At last remove the two screws at the lipo input. The top should come off quite easily, if not, check if you really removed all screws.

Take a closer look at the Syma X5 mainboard:

The three wires (red, black, yellow) that you see at the bottom are normally used for the X5c's camera control, but we are going to use the red and black cable as a power source for our step-up module. So just desolder the yellow wire completely and solder the red and black wires to the step-up module's input pins. Now just store the step-up module inside of the X5 and fiddle the output wires out of the casing. Now simply put all the screws in it's place again and store the FPV-TX and the camera where you want it to by taping it  (not very elegant but that's the way I did it :D).

Of course I did not come up with all of this myself so here are the resources that I used:

• Alex Greve's awesome build tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgAfNltlsX0 but with different TX and cam
• Cloverleaf build tutorial from David Windestål http://rcexplorer.se/diy/2011/08/the-cloverleaf-fpv-antenna/
• B-Band TX5823 (similar to TX5813) tutorial http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1787178&page=8

If you have any questions just use the comment section!

Have fun building!



How to "hack" a cheap 4 Channel MT-600 Transmitter into a 6 Channel

I decided to write a short tutorial on how to add 2 extra channels to my MT-600 transmitter, it's relatively easy, but basic soldering skills are required (being able to hold a soldering iron ;) )

What you need:

• Any cheap Soldering Iron
• Some Solder
• 5 pieces of wire (approx. 10 - 15cm)
• a two position switch
• a three position switch
• Skrewdriver

This is how you do it:

• unscrew all 6 Philips head screws (4 big and 2 small ones)

• At the back of the main PCB you will see 5 soldering pins in total (two at the top and three on the bottom)

• simply solder the two pins at the top in the right direction and the three bottom pins to the left. It should look like this:



• The three wires should now be soldered to the three connections on your three-way switch. As you can see in my picture the switch surprisingly fitted right into the drilled holes of the upper left PCB

• The two wires can now be soldered onto the two-way switch

• To close the hatch just screw it back together, don't forget the tiny ones at the top

There you go, that's how easy it is to convert a 4 to a 6 channel Receiver (at least this type).

As you can see I did some further modification by soldering two wires to the power pins on the main PCB. I don't like these Nimh Batteries very much so I wanted some extra power connectors coming out of the case to be connected to a lipo cell. You can see the result in the picture (sry for the bad quality)

There also seem to be a three trainer connections, but I wasn't able to figure out how they work. Would've been useless anyway because I don't own a second Transmitter :P

Build-Log of the Hobbyking X666 Frame Quadcopter

The Frame:

The assembly of all components was pretty straight forward (only one spring was bent so one of the landing legs vibrated very hard while the motors were running, solution was to just cut a couple windings off).
There is no manual to the X666 Frame, but it's building is similar to the X525 so just look at Hobbyking's files page to the X525 or use this link! It's really simple to build!



Mounting Motors:

Here are the three things you need to do:

1. As I was trying to put the screws and locknuts at the right position and fasten it while the landing gear is mounted I gave up very quickly... It's just not possible, you have to remove the holding screws and these stupid easy bending springs 4 times...
2. Of course the motor cannot just be mounted as is, you first need to remove the base from the brushless motor. This is done by a small setscrew that has some strange sort of head. The inbus (or Allen) bits where either to big to fit or to small so it spin the screw. The great solution was to hold the bit angular to the screw axis. This way I was able to remove these damn screws.
3. These screws tend to vibrate themselves out so the motor will just fall out of its base. Here's the thing I learned that is essential to safely build a quad:

Threadlocker such as Loctite 243 or else

I didn't bought the ultra strong Loctite because to remove the screws you need to apply heat.

Applying this is very simple, better take too much than to little. Too much won't hurt your quad, too little may result in a bad crash.


All the other stuff:

For my first Setup I needed to upload the latest OpenSource Firmware to the Control Board. This is actually a pretty easy Task. You only need an USB-ISP Interpreter (cheap ones from EBay work just fine) or an Arduino which can programmed to act like one! I already had an Atmel AVrisp mkII from former microcontroller projects so I just used this one.
You then just need to insert the ISP Header on to the Board! Now here the fun begins...
I did search for nearly an hour to find out where Pin1 is situated so I wouldn't connect the interpreter wrong and maybe even cause damage to it... At the end I just looked very closely to the board Layout, then looked on the ATmegaP328 Datasheet which pin is Miso and Mosi so I finally could figure out that pin one is up right if you look at the board full front (so you can read the infos on it)!
For the actual programming I just followed the great tutorial given by Flitetest, which is one of the nicest RC Channels on youtube!!! link

Next thing was to solder all the 3.5 gold connectors to the motor cable and fix it with the Controller Board with Velcro. I saw someone on youtube suggesting to left the Controller Board within its foambox to prevent vibrations causing problems to the Gyros so I taped Velcro directly onto the foambox.

Last thing was to mount the colet type Spinners including props onto the Brushless motor shafts.

That was it! Actually pretty easy if you have all the necessary parts ^^
I only had to wire all the inputs of my receiver to the inputs of the Controller Board and voilà :)
Here's a pic of the version 1.0 of my quadcopter :

Now its time to wait for better weather (at least no rain) and then try it out :D