I've always liked the micro brushless class. My first ever was an Atom 122 with 1105 motors and it's still one of my favourites. 

The first time I saw the Deformation Insects 130 frame, it really didn't do it for me. The proportions just look off to my mind. The 30mm standoffs between the lower and upper plates are simply too tall.



Then I remembered that I had some 20mm M2 standoffs in my parts box. Why make a build easy when you can make it properly hard? So here's what went into the build:

Frame: Deformation Insects 130
Motors: EMax RS1306 4000kv Red Bottom
ESC: RacerStar 20A 4-in-1 BLHeli_S BB2 ESC
Propellers: RotorX V2 3040 triblades
Flight controller: OZE32 F1 AIO with current sensor and OSD
Flight Camera: 600TVL CMOS with microphone
Video Transmitter: FPVHobby Fatshark compatible 10-100mW
Receiver: LemonRX DSMX diversity satellite, without case
Battery: Turnigy Nanotech 4S 850mA/h 45-90C or Turnigy Graphene 4S 500mA/h 45-65C
All Up Weight (AUW): 232g (with 850mA/h) or 199g (with 500mA/h)
Dry weight: 130g

A conservative estimate of thrust at full throttle with these motors and props on 4S is around 1100g.

The frame is advertised as having a 2.5mm thick lower plate and a 1mm upper plate. Mine has a 2.75mm thick bottom plate (great!) and a 1.25mm thick top plate which is probably just thick enough. The biggest miss with the kit was that the supplied M2 screws that are supposed to screw into the standoffs were only 4mm long which would leave a completely inadequate 1.25mm of screw thread above the lower plate to hold the standoffs! Thankfully, I had some 5.5mm screws in the parts box to fix that problem. Otherwise, the frame is nicely cut and the carbon fibre seems to be of good quality.


Mounting the motors and connecting them to the 4-in-1 ESC was the easiest part of the build. As you can see, there's a bit more to get into the frame.



The OZE32 flight controller has a small amount of copper that's supposed to allow you to connect all the ESCs, the battery and everything else - I was kind of glad that I didn't need to fit all those wires on about 10mm of copper strip! It does, at least, have an OSD, a 3A 5V BEC and a current sensor, but the fun part is wiring it up to take advantage of the current sensor together with the 4-in-1 ESC.
I mounted the ESC with the motor pads at the front and rear rather than at the sides to keep the finished result nice and neat.

Anyway, with the onboard current sensor, the battery has to first go to the flight controller and then to the ESC and back again. In the end, it wasn't too bad:





An XT30 battery connector is perfect for this size of build. An XT60 would weigh too much and look kind of daft on such a tiny quad!

Then it was time to get the camera, VTX and receiver in there. The camera was easy with a 3D printed holder that fitted nicely into the 20mm space after a little sanding at the top. The FPVHobby VTX weighs just two grammes, including the antenna. I decided that hot glue was the best thing to hold the antenna in place and protect the VTX in a crash.



Making all the cables took more time than any other part of the build!

Finally, everything was starting to come together:



I thought I'd found room for the very important beeper on top of the battery plug, but ended up relocating it to one of the arms. At least I remembered to put the battery strap under the 4-in-1 ESC right at the start!

Once the top plate was on, I realised quite how far I'd pushed minimising the space inside the frame.



Here's the final result:



I finished this one around Christmas time, so I've not had too much time to really fly it properly yet. It's certainly insanely fast, but I also found that my range wasn't more than about 30 metres. When I look at how close the LemonRX satellite is to the VTX, I'm fairly sure that the VTX is swamping the receiver circuits, but I think I can solve that problem by moving the RX just a little bit further forward and adding some self adhesive aluminium tape to shield it. I hope that's the problem!

The last couple of days here have seen the first hints of spring, so getting the Insect up to full range will be one of the first things on my list.

The build was lots of fun and with nearly a 6:1 power to weight ratio, this little beast will be more than capable of giving some much larger quads a bit of a shock!

A nice review of your quad! I have been looking at the frame myself for moving the electronics from my crashed youbi, but ended up with a kingkong gt130 frame. I used the eachine 25/50/200mW micro vtx with a linear antenna and it worked quite good, so if you are looking for something more robust than the cloverleaf, I'll guess you'll do fine with the linear

Here's the vtx. very nice for light builds imo:

http://m.banggood.com/Eachine-VTX03-Supe...14206.html

I grabbed a couple of those as soon as they came out. I've not had a chance to use one yet, but I'm thinking of putting one on my ZX5 build which actually has less room for the electronics than this tiny little quad!

The FPVHobby VTX is nearly 1g lighter than these, but then again, it's also three times the price! When I built the DI130, Eachine hadn't come out with these new micro VTXs, so I didn't have that much to choose from.

I hope the electronics on your Youbi was better put together than mine. I checked mine over very carefully before powering it up the first time and noticed that the big inductor on the top of the flight controller was only soldered on one side!

(14-Mar-2017, 12:04 PM)oyvinla Wrote: Here's the vtx. very nice for light builds imo:

http://m.banggood.com/Eachine-VTX03-Supe...14206.html

Just be aware they're quite fragile - on one a capacitor has fallen off (currently waiting for Banggood to send a new one) and my other will not pass a video signal as the solder points are fried... (that was my fault though!)

BTW @unseen - great build and impressive shrinkage!

(14-Mar-2017, 04:03 PM)unseen Wrote: I grabbed a couple of those as soon as they came out. I've not had a chance to use one yet, but I'm thinking of putting one on my ZX5 build which actually has less room for the electronics than this tiny little quad!

The FPVHobby VTX is nearly 1g lighter than these, but then again, it's also three times the price! When I built the DI130, Eachine hadn't come out with these new micro VTXs, so I didn't have that much to choose from.

I hope the electronics on your Youbi was better put together than mine. I checked mine over very carefully before powering it up the first time and noticed that the big inductor on the top of the flight controller was only soldered on one side!

My youbi didn't last longer than the first weekend as I crashed into a ninja branch, which directed the poor youbi into a big stone and then ricochet into a puddle of water. The camera was gone, the canopy shattered into pieces and the TBS triumph antenna I had on it got destroyed. The FC got bent and the vtx was gone, but the flight controller still worked kind of. I put the FC on the new kingkong build, but during fast flips, it stops for a split second half way through the flip and then keeps going. I guess the FC is toast as well

Those ninja branches eh?

The worst thing by far with the Youbi was the supplied propellers. Two of them were balanced, but the other two needed significant amounts of tape to get them even close to balanced. It's hardly surprising that people had problems with poor flight characteristics. The fact that there's no provision for black box logging doesn't help either.

Yep, exactly my problem as well with the props. They were just rubbish. I fly the new quad with kingkong 3x3x4 (looks the same) and they were much better balanced, but gets out of balance after a crash.

Nicely done! No suprise coming from you thanks for sharing Unseen.

Nice build @unseen 
Cool to see old frames still being used to such good use.

I still have my deformation insect first thing i did was put 20mm standoffs which i accidentally had when LiftRC sent me m2 ones instead of M3 for their frame (got me stuck on the LRC build for a while though)

My build is with 3S 1105 motors with 108g dry weight, I now have TMotor 1406 which I want to put on it or just sell it as is....

Here my video of it flying (2in1 video actually) from long long time ago.....


BTW: thanks for the small VTX tip, ordered 3

Thanks!

That's some nice flying! Plenty of speed on the straights as well.

The 1105 motors are really great for micro builds. I used them on my Atom 122 which was my first ever micro build and they give great performance on 3S. The Atom is in parts for a rebuild at the moment, but I'll be keeping the 1105s and reducing the weight even more with a 20mm flight controller. For me, micro build are really about keeping weight and power consumption to a minimum. Sure, you can put much larger and heavier motors on these craft, but that means larger and heavier batteries and they end up being nowhere near as agile as a really light build.

The FPVHobby VTX boards are expensive compared to the latest crop of micro VTXs from Banggood, but the quality is much better, as is the design of the electronics. They don't get anywhere near as hot and output a nice clean signal.

So, I managed to solve the drop out problems I was having with the LemonRX satellite receiver by replacing it with a remarkably tiny FrSky XM receiver. Once I'd got it bound and installed, I went out for a quick line of sight test in the snow.

The little XM gave me plenty of range, a little too much in fact! As I flew out past the 300 metre mark and thought - great it works really well! - I realised I had to fly that tiny dot in the sky back to me. Now I'm pretty good at line of sight and working out which way my craft is flying by watching which direction it's moving in, but this time, I suddenly realised that I was heading towards a bunch of trees way too fast to try another move and be sure of avoiding them, so I had to ditch the DI130 and watch it cartwheel across the field. Apart from some broken and bent props, it handled the crash very well!