Parts Upgrade
Motor: After quickly trying the racerstar RT1106, I switched back to the original BBB 1105 motor. The Racerstar motors introduced some awful oscillations, and had a tendancy to lose their bell very easily..
Camera: I upgraded the camera to Split mini 2, with the new lens and the one board form factor. We’ll see how it fit into the frame.
And that’s it, the AIO Zeus board and the Vtx are still alive and performing well, so I kept them.
While the quad was dismantled, I upgraded both Betaflight to 4.2 and BLHeli_S to JazzMaverick to get advantage of the RPM filtering feature.
Upside down build
As I had all the carbon plate on the frame in front of me, I realized there may be a way to build the quad in a much more balanced way than prevouisly. Indeed, by swapping the main plate with the middle deck, the two stacks end up below the motors. This configuration distribute the weight more evenly across the prop line, with the battery on top and the electronics below.
However, the main plate and the middle deck don’t have the same thickness. So I used the light version of the frame with a 2mm main plate and filled the side plates to make everything fit.
The Split mini 2 was a bit challenging to install. The camera flex is different and on the opposite side from the v1. I had to disconnect the camera, and pass the flex through the main plate first. The camera is then mounted upside down, but that’s okay as it’s possible to flip the image in the configuration menu. The receiver sit just under the Split board.
One side effect of this build was that the electronics are now too exposed to my taste. I then printed a TPU skirt to protect all the drone internal. Also printed a new back support for the XT30 and the Vtx antenna. It adds an extra 2g, but worth it. I like durable quad.
Flight Performance
Flight characteristic feels much more smooth than the previous build. Hard to say the influence of the upside down configuration, but I think most of the improvement comes from the software upgrade (BF & BLHeli_S).
The Split 2 video quality is definitly better than the v1. Unfortunatly, I still have some jello on the footage. Gonna play with ND filter to fix this. No edit ready yet, coming soon !