HDZero

[Bad Raven]

A precis post of my experences with HDZero so far brought to one place rather than splattered across lots of posts.

Bought Transporter2 HDZero headset while waiting for Goggles to reach public.  Housing for these is rubbish, made my own by 3D printing a connector for the magnetic screen to housing and mounting it on an old headset housing with usablefocus distance and a fresnel lens that actually worked.

Bought Mobula6 HDZero and Moblite7 HDZero.  Soon discovered that the 6 was minimally powered and a touch to a wall causing a motor surge would cut video, not enough battery current to offset this, or faulty VTX, or the Transporter?  Played with different batteries, no difference. Changed the VTX, no difference.  Put the Mob6 electronics in a 75 frame with 75 props to be able to carry 75 sized batteries, job done, MUCH better. 

Goggles arrived, and much better than Transporter, but then they should be, being over twice the price.

Bought a Freestyle VTX. BIG mistake, the things a complete pain in the rear, should have stuck to the micro class for HDZero as I'd intended.  Eventually beat it into a half decent state but for my flying the better latency (which IS noticeable) is not worth the poorer performance around trees, etc. It  should have a better antenna connection than UFL, and I have had to do UFL to SMA and a decent (and costly) SMA antenna to get acceptable (but still inferior to DJI) performance.  NOT buying any more.

HDZero Fleet by now was:

Mobula6 - in a BetaFPV Meteor frame  - EXCELLENT

Moblite7 - with 4 blade props (TinyRC) and a modded battery cage (ex E010) - OK but really needs the frame changing to a BetaFPV Meteor, as was a pain getting the thing to not be over nervous on throttle, its just TOO light as it comes.

Foxeer CineWhoop - This is not a great design, the VTX is too buried away and insufficiently cooled so is always on the point of shutdown unless flown around like a freestyle, which of course with ducts and weight it sucks at. Major dismantling to update the VTX firmware, too.  Its very toughly constructed, very robust, and would be a good first quad if it were not for the VTX heating.

GEPRC Mk5 - built by me with Freestyle VTX as a back to back comparison to my DJI one - the quads truly great, the VTX is total carp!  I will fit a Vista when I have the time.

Flywoo "Firefly" 1.6 V2 -  Had to make a 3D TPU battery holder as the ones supplied were far too small, not as yet tuned, has propwash to try to remove, VERY quiet yet powerful.

The latest build is a own design Hybrid, it has:-

BetaFPV Meteor 75 Frame
BetFPV 85 Canopy (without the stupid "Knight" scraggle catchers!)
Happymodel EX1002 20000kV Motors
Happymodel X12 Lite V1.0 Flight Controller (no VTX)
HDZero WhoopLite VTX
RunCam Nano 90 camera (Bigger lens and heavier than the HDZ Nano)
Moblite7 2 blade props
A30 battery connection

I had trouble with this cutting video seconds into flight as the motors loaded up, SOLVED by feeding the VTX from the battery pads and not the VTX power connections on the board.

The without battery weights are:-

Mob6 in 75 frame - 27.3g
Moblite7 -        31.7g
Hybrid75 -        38.3g

So far the extra weight seems to improve stability and smoothes throttle response, while not seemingly dropping performance by anything noticeable. Its a very nice handling quad indeed. What it does to battery duration remains to be seen, and I intend to fly it both 1S as so far tested on 530mAh and try 2S 380mAh (as I have lots) when I have soldered up some XT30 to A30 converters as all my 2S are XT30.