title: RC Equipment description: My gear and the modifications I did to it parent: quadcopters position: 80 date: 2015-10-09
Over the years of flying quadcopters and other stuff I have grown quite the collection of self-made or customized gear.
When out flying alone or with a partner, often people walk their dogs nearby or families go on a walk together and see us. This often sparks a conversation. For these occasions, it turned out to be very useful to have some kind of second screen and receiver with me.
A friend of mine even has a spare cheap set of FPV goggles with him most of the time.
I decided to go a slightly different route. For my first experiments, I bought the Quanum DIY FPV Goggle Set. I didn’t really like the box-style of goggles, so I quickly took the monitor from the set and used it stand-alone.
After I switched to proper FatShark goggles, I used the Quanum monitor again, this time for a spectator monitor.
I built a simple wooden box out of left-over parts and hot-glue, with a large cut-out in the front for the monitor.
Inside is not only a FR632 Diversity Rx but also an Eachine ProDVR, 2x 18650 cells, voltage regulators, a fan and a voltmeter. The channel can be selected on the receiver, with cut-outs on the back. The DVR can be controlled using external push buttons. A power switch, as well as a switch to select either the Rx video feed or the DVR video feed, are on the top.
The batteries hold up for maybe 3 sessions with spectators. I had to add the fan after the first tests because it simply got too hot inside the box and the first DVR died after a while.
The quality of the Quanum monitor is great and it does not switch to a blue-screen when the signal is fading. The DVR does not work 100% reliable, but considering my FatShark Dominator v3 has a built-in DVR as well, I’m not really dependant on it.
Many years ago, a long time before I even started getting into Quadcopters, my grandpa bought me a cheap 2.4GHz Transmitter from Conrad Elektronik. Because this was already available when I started building my own copters, I used it for that as well. Turns out, it is a Flysky-clone, with it’s own shoddy PC software. So I wrote my own Mac driver for it. After using it with its original receiver for a while, I decided to move into the FrSky ecosystem. So I swapped out the built-in transmitter for a FrSky DHT with the TTL mod to connect my own telemetry display.
Also see the article about my Saitek X52 USB joystick experiments.
Having so many high-capacity LiPo batteries around because of this hobby is kinda scary of course, after looking at a bunch of battery fires on YouTube. So I at least wanted to have some kind of fire-proof enclosure for charging my batteries in. I decided to go the common ammo-can route for this.
When doing this, it is very important to modify the can so it no longer is pressure-tight. Otherwise you’re building something more like a bomb. Many people remove the seal in the lid for this, but I decided to drill a couple of large holes into the can, as well as a rectangular cutout for the charging cables.
The holes have a piece of mesh glued in front of them, to keep debris out. And the inner walls of the can have been padded with cardboard, to prevent any chance of short-circuiting on the metal sheet of the can.
The files for the modified 3D printed case can be found on my Thingiverse profile.