The frame of the drone supports the rest of the components.

Assembly

To assemble the carbon frames follow the instructions from the hexcopter frame - they apply equally well to the quadcopters. Each screw before assembly should be slightly dipped in blue (weak to allow replacing damaged components) treadlock to prevent loosening from vibrations during flight.

Components

Good Choices

The carbon fiber Talon frames are good choices.

Quadcopter

• ​Turnigy Talon Quadcopter (V2.0) Carbon Fiber Frame 550mm (USA Warehouse) this frame offers about a 12cm x 12cm area in the middle for the electronics

• ​Turnigy Talon Carbon Fiber Quadcopter Frame- very similar to version 2 shown above

Hexcopter

​Turnigy Talon Hexcopter (V1.0) Carbon Fiber Frame - 625mm (USA warehouse)

This frame offers almost 30cm x 30cm in the middle for mounting electronics

Advantages

• easy and fast to assemble (~1h for the quadcopter, ~1.5h for the hexcopter)
• very rigid
• resilient to minor crashes
• modular, hence easy to fix if one or more arms break
• has short, well placed legs for easy landings and take-offs
• flat platform for mounting the electronics

Disadvantages

• a bit costlier than other frames
• a bit heavier than other frames

Blind Alleys

Before setting on the solutions above we tried the following:

• ​HobbyKing Quadcopter Frame V1 (USA Warehouse) - plywood frame. Inexpensive, and light, but not as rigid as the carbon fiber, very flimsy legs (unusable), difficult to fix after a crash, requires glue (regular superglue is not a great choice) for assembly, translating in a long assembly time, not a flat platform (difficult to build the payload up)

• ​Hobbyking Fiberglass Quadcopter Frame 500mm very similar frame to the plywood one minus the glue requirement (but practically impossible to fix other than replacing arms); also, absolutely no legs (lands on the battery)