My schedule has not been conducive to building new copters lately. I’ve been in the midst of mega rebuild of the 680 Alien quadcopter and associated gimbal setup. The second I got that working to my satisfaction is the second I moved my build energy to the Arris X-Speed 250 quadcopter racer.

It’s a good thing I put off this build, because during the time I took a break from it, they created a build manual! Needless to say, my guesses were completely wrong, so I had to basically rip it all apart and rebuild, and rewire.

The current build state is 3/4 of the frame is assembled. Also, the motors and ESC’s are installed and soldered to the included power/signal distribution board.

Stay tuned for further progress, and future crash videos.

Strange behavior in my Alien last night. Finally tried a test flight of the new setup with my gimbal mount forward and battery back a tiny bit. This is to attempt to get the props out of the video/photo frame.

On take off my bird would not yaw clockwise, only counter. And it would not hold position. Luckily I was able to land it without doing any damage as I had minimal control. I recalibrated the GPS/compass but still issues. A look at my motor outputs (photo below) shows the clockwise motors are at a much lower output than the other two.

Because of this event I decided to upgrade the firmware on the MiniX flight controller and will probably go through all the stick calibrations again.  More testing soon.