QAV 400 Drone

I recently bought the QAV400 ARF kit by GetFPV and had a blast with it. However, I wanted to go further than having just some shaky gopro shots so I decided to buy a tarot gimbal. To mount it upwards I had to make some modifications with a gopro base. The top part of the elongated gopro base seemed to be perfect as the upper part was screwed. With a dremel I made the top flush and mounted the gimbal with the help of some epoxy. Although you can’t really point the gopro 90 degrees down, it sits leveled with the rest of the frame and it work as a quick release gimbal. I also had to move the sensor that tracks the camera because the gimbal doesn’t support an upside down sensor.

The finished product:

Conclusions:

The QAV400 frame with the cc3d is AWESOME and the orange bobbings remove ALL vibrations. I ran with chopped and unbalanced props and there wasn’t any jello. The flight times with the gimbal and a 3300mah 4s battery were around 5–7 minutes. However, my gimbal mount has its defects and it came off in some landings. Even though it is an expensive frame, it was worth every penny as a introductory frame. I have never flown a quad before and from a noob perspective is wasn’t so hard. The cc3d set up time was round 10 minutes, faster that I ever imagined, although it lacks some features that might be a deal breaker for some, but for the money and quality it is worth getting one just to have the true feel as you would get in a kk2, but more refined. The gimbal was also great and had excelent build quality straight out of the box.

Final Set-Up:

Flight-Times-7–9 minutes

QAV400

Lumenier FX2216–9 Motors

APC 8x5 or Graupners 8x5

EzUHF 8ch with diversity

3300mah 4s Turnigy NanoTech

30A ESCs with SimonK

5.8 Ghz 600mw immersion RC transmitter

Cloverleaf for Rx and SkewPlannar for Tx

Fat Shark Predator

Turnigy 9x with EzUHF

CC3D from RMRC

Fat Shark 600TVL camera

GoPro Hero 3+ Black

Tarot Gimbal