Great to hear! That thing is impressive and shall create jealousy in all who see it I am sure.

(02-May-2017, 10:03 PM)Carl.Vegas Wrote: Great to hear! That thing is impressive and shall create jealousy in all who see it I am sure.

Thanks! I'll see if I can get some video of it.

To be honest, this build made me a little nervous. Cramming all that high current electronics between two plates of metal and earthing everything to the frame itself is a new experience for me. You can't imagine how relieved I was when I first connected my bench power supply to the XT60 and the current limiter didn't turn on hard as soon as I switched it on!

I was very cautious for the first few minutes of flight, gradually asking for more and more extreme changes in throttle. When I could see that going from full throttle to zero and back again just inches from the ground didn't provoke any surprises, then I let it rip.

Looking at the initial black box logs, I can see a bit of D-term oscillation. Nothing major, but it could account for the warmth that I felt in the motors. Next time, I'll log the raw gyro data and see what the noise spectrum looks like. It'll be interesting to see if there is any difference between the SwiftBlade and a 250 carbon fibre frame with similar motors and props.

The SwiftBlade's aluminium frame is substantial. The arms are 5.1mm thick and the two plates that make up the sandwich are each 1.6mm. Where the curved parts of each arm meet as they sweep back towards the frame, the width is 9.5mm.



The lower plate is separated from the upper plate by a spacer, a lug washer and the arm. A steel M3 bolt goes through the lot and is secured into the red aluminium standoff with blue thread lock. Each ESC is grounded to a lug washer, as is the battery negative at the rear of the craft and the flight controller.



The upper plate is also 1.6mm thick and is secured to the standoffs with six M3 titanium bolts.

The whole frame is incredibly rigid. The flight controller, while being mounted on foam tape is very much in contact with the frame as the wires that must run above it are pressed lightly onto it by the upper plate.

I don't know what effect (if any) this will have on how much vibration the frame picks up and which frequencies (if any) it might amplify. It'll certainly be interesting to see!

yo fellow swede here, i just want to point out that if you skip the sideplates for the camera mount you will weaken the frame a whole lot..
 here is my build with this frame ;D
 Also i didnt really like the idea of using the frame as ground, did fint a fc with built in pdb bec that fit right inbetween the plates ;D

Nice to see another SwiftBlade in the wild, welcome to the forum!

I'm not convinced that the camera plates add that much to the frame's strength. After all, the entire long section of the top plate has no other connections to the middle plate than the rear and middle standoffs and I'm sure Johan would have added side plates there as well if they were needed for structural reasons.

Using the frame as ground is just fine. Getting used to the idea is the leap that you have to make and it's really no different to any car and they've used the metalwork as the negative connection since before we were born!