Disassembly of a 250 Size Quadcopter

The video above shows the disassembly of the Diatone 250 quadcopter that we flew at the UK Drone Show in December. Having bought myself a tripod, I used CASA's Hero 4 Session camera to record the process of disassembling the quadcopter to check how much damage I did during the agility competition. Personally, I'm surprised it's still in one piece, but it proved itself to be a very resilient little quadcopter. The prop guards are a bit of a mess, but that was to be expected.

The only issue that came up was that a wire on the front right motor came loose. It would probably have been fine if left alone, but pulling the insulation tape wrapping off broke a motor wire at the point where it attaches to the PCB pads. You can't see it very well in the disassembly video, but there's another re-assembly video in the pipeline where it is obvious. I'm going to have a look at re-designing the pads so it can't happen again. They're basically fine, but there needs to be some additional mechanical support for the wires. That's how I normally build aircraft anyway - pick a component, improve it and replace it.

Just for the record, the video was recorded using a GoPro Hero 4 Session camera in timelapse mode, taking one shot every 2 seconds. I've used the GoPro Studio software with the "correct fisheye" option to make the picture square, then exported it using their YouTube settings to mp4. I'm not sure about that last step as it has cropped the picture top and bottom quite a lot. The camera is only about 35cm above the worktop, which isn't giving me much room to work in. The fisheye correction also crops the picture a huge amount, so I don't think this is the best camera to do a close-up timelapse with.

I nearly forgot, but I made an inventory of all the components as they were removed, along with weighing everything. If you want to build your own one, then these are the bits you need:

All cable ties and tape (red container contents) 9g
Motor screws (silver and black) 6g
4 white nylon standoffs+4 top bolts+4 blue nylon washers 4g
(the standoffs on their own are 2g)
4 props (5x3 or 5x4) 8g
Frame with Velcro for RX, but blue battery Velcro removed+feet 96g
Flip 32+ cover (blue)+4 small screws 4g
Flip 32+ 8g
Power distribution borad+wires+fabric insulation+8 gold plugs+1 Deans connector 27g
2 Blue Velcro battery straps 1g
FrSky X8R+Velcro 17g
4 black carbon prop guards (+repairs) 20g
FrSky SBUS to CPPM converter 4g
Top Left Motor (EMAX MT1806)+ESC+PCB Pads+Gold Connectors+Servo Cable Tie+Motor+Nut 32g
Bottom Left Motor (same as above) 31g
Top Right Motor (same as above) 33g
Bottom Right Motor (same as above) 31g
4 blue motor disks (part of the frame) 7g
TOTAL 338g

Add a Hyperion G3 3S 1100mAh 45C LiPo (100g) and that gives an AUW of:
AUW TOTAL (FLYING) 438g

Bearing in mind that a single MT1806 motor has a quoted thrust of 375g on a 5x3 prop and 3S LiPo, then my power to weight ratio comes out as 3.4! I thought it was quite lively when I was flying it, but put it down to the 45C packs being rather good. On that basis it's probably not a beginner's quadcopter.