Build a Drone With Six Motors

From a tricopter with 3 motors and a tail servo, to quads, this time, we're venturing into 6 motor category with the Frelon Y6 frame! It has 2 more motors than your typical quad, thankfully Meps offered to send me some motors to review as well, so I told them to send me 6 so I can put them on this beauty! Check out my build of this Frelon Y6, as well as my thoughts on the highly-controversial Mepsking motors!

Supplies

Parts List for the Frelon Y6 Drone:

Frelon Y6 5" Frame - https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009028705055 | [e-mail]

Speedybee F405 V3 + Speedybee 50A ESCs https://amzn.to/3EudX2Q | https://shope.ee/AK8CMZmhtO

Meps Space SZ2306 1950kv Motors https://www.mepsking.com/sz2306-fpv-brushless-motor-for-5inch-freestyle-drone.html

TBS Unify Pro32 https://amzn.to/3R7O6W9

TBS Crossfire Nano RX SE https://amzn.to/44BXnsw

Runcam Nano 2 https://amzn.to/3Zf6KgH | https://bit.ly/3FWPemA

BE-220 GPS https://amzn.to/45Yd0vs | https://shope.ee/40E8pzbQUJ

MR30 Connectors https://amzn.to/465pHEV | https://shope.ee/40E8puzNMZ

Ethix P3B PB&J 5" bi-blade https://amzn.to/3RcnxPI

Gemfan Hurricane MCK 51466 V2 5" tri-blade https://amzn.to/3sJEXsG

4mm M3 Screws https://amzn.to/3Lp2NjJ

Frelon 3D Printed Parts https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5142131

GoPro Mount with GPS and ViFly Finder https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6074274

Other Tools You May Need

TS100/TS101 Smart Soldering Iron - https://amzn.to/465XSMy

Step 1: Frame Assembly

The frame we're using is the Eaglewings Frelon Y6 frame, and it's surprising that it has just a few carbon fiber parts that came with it. Your typical quadcopter might actually have more parts than this. The Frelon Y6 frame is not mass-produced and all of these carbon fiber parts and these 3D printed parts were just produced by one guy in France by the name of Ludo Treize. So that definitely also explains why this is a little bit more expensive than your typical quadcopter frame because it's like a one-man boutique that's just producing and not a factory in China or something like that.

So the bottom plate has holes for a 20x20 board towards the back which you can use put a VTX there or something. And you can see that there are no holes at the center because the bottom plate doesn't actually hold most of your electronics. It's actually the top plate that does. And the the way you would build this is you would mount all your electronics on the underside of the of the top plate. There are holes there for either a 30x30 stack or a 20x20 stack so whether you have a mini flight controller or a full-size board you can use them with this frame, and there's another set of holes at the back and that's because this is using six motors; one 4-in-1 ESC is not going to be enough so you have to have another one at the back to have enough ESCs for all of your motors. There are two kinds of arms. The arm which has a bigger hole goes to the back where one of the aluminum standoffs go through there, and the other 2 arms are for the front.

Obviously you just have three arms with a Y6 and the design is quite a nice for the motor holes because you have your holes for your motor screws and these larger holes so you can mount one set of motors on the other side of this.

It also comes with a canopy or pod which is what the creator calls it. The Pod for the front supports both a digital or analog system. It also comes with a GoPro Mount which goes up on the top plate. There are a lot more parts available like if you need a GPS mount or an antenna mount. They are available on Thingiverse (see Supplies) uploaded by Ludo so you can download that and you can even print your own custom pods and other mounts if you have different kinds of GPS units there's a lot of available.

Let's start off with the six screws that are the longest in the bunch obviously these thickest screws would need to go through the thickest parts of the build and that would be the top plate and arms. Also notice that the top plate is chamfered or filleted (I'm not really sure about the term) that makes it really nice but it also adds to the cost in terms of manufacturing. The longest screws fit really nicely especially with these Nyloc nuts.At this point you just want to hand tighten everything; I don't want to tighten everything because we still need to put in our electronics for this build, so I just want to build this out just to show how this frame looks like when it's fully assembled. For the rear aluminum standoff you take this shorter one and put them through the holes and screw the standoffs in. For the final two standoff you want to take your camera pod and you want to push these aluminum standoffs through these holes and once they're through just screw them here at the front top plate. So I noticed that it came with these four pan head screws so we are going to put them here that would screw on through through this GoPro TPU mount and through to the standoffs. It's actually plain looking without all the electronics and all of the motors but we'll soon see how this would look like.

If you notice the electronics would be mounted here up on top and the you know your stack is actually underneath the motor line so it reminds me of some of another quad that I have which is also have a similar design if you remember my good old Ummakwad that has the stack also under the top plate and near the motor line. These are actually really good designs if you're interested in building one yourself the Frelon comes in different sizes. At the time, I paid 90 Euros with an additional 7.95 Euros in fees and after we figured out shipping I sent another 30 Euros with 5.89 Euros in fees so it might be better if you sort everything out and send payment in one whole transaction.

Update: Below are the current prices as of March 2024:

• 2.5" - 50euro
• 3" - 70euro
• 4" - 75euro
• 5" - 120euro
• 6" - 140euro
• 7" - 145euro
• 8/10" - 350euro

Hardware (screws, spacers, and nuts) are included of course, and you can choose what color you want the 3D prints to be in: black, white, blue, red, neon yellow, neon green, teal, army green, grey, pink

Shipping is also now a flat 15euros worldwide with tracking so this is great news for everyone!

However with the Frelon, the battery is mounted at the bottom, so it would have been better if the battery was designed to be on top so that the center of gravity would be concentrated at the top plate and near the motor line.

The stack is mounted on the top plate so it's upside down and the the reason for this design is that most of your weight is up here near the line where your motors and your your props are. The thing with the Ummakwad is that the battery is top mounted so all of your weight, your center of mass, center of gravity, is all here in this central location near the prop line and here at the center. The key difference here with the Frelon Y6 is that while the stack is also mounted on top underneath the top plate, the batteries are underslung so it's not as ideal as the Ummagawd Remix because your weight of the battery is far away from the props and away from the stack, so the the stack being top-mounted really doesn't make that much of a difference. But this is the V1 frame and we haven't even built this thing yet so we don't know how it flies but there is already a V2 frame where the the arms are mounted or fixed on the bottom plate and in the future maybe we can also check that out.

Step 2: Motor Discussion

Both the Meps King 2306 and 2207 motors are efficient motors and they're not really like top-end performing motors, they're more of the middle-of-the-road motors and that's exactly what I was looking for. While the 2306 is slightly less powerful and has less torque than the 2207, I wanted the 2306 because I wanted something that was really, really short because I was going to put these on a Frelon Y6 frame so I'm going to have two motors on these arms and they're going to be coaxial. And I just didn't want really something that was really really chunky and really tall because I'm going to have a motor on top and a motor on the bottom. And having a short motor would mean that's not going to be so thick.

Looking at this side by side with a Racerstar SIC 2207 motor, which is a premium motor, you can see that there is a significant height difference with these two motors. This 2207 unfortunately I can't do a side-by-side test because my Racerstar Sic is a 4S motor and this Meps King 2306 is a 6S motor. Both of these motors have 9mm bearings which are pretty standard now for these kinds of motors. They both have shaft screws on on the bottom so you can remove the the unibel.

I also have this iFlight Xing 2208 so this is a really really tall motor. These are the motors that I have on my tricopter and you can see really the height difference of these. These are really really tall so imagine if I was going to put these here now it's going to have another 2208 at the bottom that's going to be really, really big it's also a little bit heavier.

Step 3: Best Electronics Stack for a Y6

For our stack we are going to be using the Speedybee f405 V3 stack and we also need a second 50 amp ESC. So this is a great electronic stack because aside from Speedybee being a manufacturer of really good Electronics, this flight controller has a 2 amp BEC, it has onboard voltage meter, and you can also configure Betaflight via the Speedybee app over bluetooth so you don't even need to connect this to your computer. The reason this is perfect for our Frelon Y6 build is because you have your motor 5 to motor 8 pins so you don't have to fiddle around with remapping an LED strip or PPM pad, whether you're building a Y6 like we are or you're going to put this on an octocopter or an X8 cinelifter build, this is going to be the perfect stack for you. If you don't have one of these stacks and you're just using another flight controller there is a way to get motor 5 and a motor 6 output via the LED strip as well as a PPM Pad, but you have to fiddle with resource mapping in Betaflight so that's a little bit more work. So we are going to be using this stack on our Frelon Y6 build. There are some small parts and accessories that came with the FC stack and the ESC, so this is going to be most of what you're going to need for any build that you're planning on.

Step 4: Mounting to the Frelon

For the front ESC (ESC #1) I use these 30 millimeter M3 screws that came with the SpeedyBee stack and I also had to raise this board up because of these nuts that were sticking out onto the underside of the pads so I just used this stack of three hex nuts and if you have some extra gummies or extra standoffs to act as a spacer. Now the the back ESC (ESC #2) didn't have that problem so you could just mount it with with just regular M3 screws and just mount it straight to the frame. And our flight controller is going here up on top of ESC #1.

Step 5: Easy-swap Motors

I've cut the motor wire short and I'm just going to connect these through some MR30 connectors so that we can easily swap out Motors. Now my motor wires are nice and short and around one and a half inches and we are going to do this to all of our Motors.

Step 6: Wiring for 6 Motors

ESC #1 is wired to our flight controller using this included wire harness that came with this stack but for ESC #2 we are going to have to solder ground as well as Motor 5 and Motor 6 to one of its four motor pads. Just a quick note you need to flip one of your ESC boards, in this case I flipped my back ESC around, so that the positive and the negative of both ESC boards line up or else we're going to have a really bad time. We're going to be using the motor pads for ESC #2's ESC 2 & 4. So that means we have to solder a wire on to ground, skip Vcc and motor pad 1, solder motor pad 2, skip motor pad 3, then solder to motor pad 4. Then we pass the wires underneath the board and then solder it on top to their respective pads on the flight controller.

We're done with our Motors so now we need to attach the other side of the MR30 connectors using the wires that we got from cutting these motors. I made the MR30 plugs with the Wire left over from the motors, and I'm just going to cut them in half. We're going to solder this onto our ESC (see photos for a preview of how we're going to solder it up) so we have one MR30 connector on top of each arm and then also we also have an MR30 connector on the underside of each arm.

Before we plug in our Motors let's first connect the receiver, VTX, and the camera to our flight controller.

Step 7: TPU Parts

The Frelon came with two TPU parts that came with a package, the GoPro mount and the camera pod, but there are also several other options that you can choose from and you can print this on your own you can download the files from Thingiverse or you can order it directly from Ludo, such as the antenna mounts for your Crossfire Immortal-T which mounts at the back stand off. And you can either have your antenna mounted vertically or horizontally. These are all personal preferences or aesthetic choices that you may have to make.

There are also several options depending on what kind of video antenna that you have. There is a single SMA antenna mount for analog systems, and there are also other mounts for a DJI Vista or something like that. There are also different sizes of GPS mounts like for a BN-880/BE-880, the M8Q, and for the BN-220/BE-220 sized GPS. There's also some third-party makers who are creating these parts. One is particularly interesting because it has a GoPro mount so it replaces the part that is bundled with the Frelon, but it also has the GPS mount right at the back and it also has space for a ViFly Finder too. And you can also print the button to turn the Vifly off when the beeper is going off. Aside from these essential things, you can also create or print different pods that come in different varieties depending on what camera, and I printed mine out in multi-color for aesthetic purposes. There's also a pod variation that has an Immoral-T antenna mount up in front. It's really up to you what kind of personal preference or what parts that are available to you, so I'll just link the files to them in the Supplies section.

Step 8: Camera, RX, VTX, & GPS

Aside from having eight motor outputs, what I really like about the Speedybee flight controller is that it's really well laid out. It's quite clear where you can solder things and everything is labeled so it's really easy to solder to. I've already soldered all of my components onto the board and I'll just explain all of the wirings.

On the upper side to the left, we have our camera here with 5V (red), ground (black), and the camera video in (yellow). There's another pad next to it if you have a camera that supports OSD control. Stil on the upper side but to the right, I have my crossfire wired up, and that's ground (black), 5V (red), RX (yellow), and TX (white).

Over at the bottom we have our VTX and if your VTX is like this one which has a 7-26V range, there's a 9V pad here (red, slightly red orange) which I'm using, ground (black), VTX video pad (yellow), and your smart audio pad (white) which is a TX on UART1 or T1. To the left we have our GPS added to 5V (red), ground (black), and then the TX (green) and RX (white) pad. If you're using something like a BN/BE-880 which also has a compass, there are two pads marked SDA and SCL which you need to solder onto and that's for the compass.

Step 9: Capacitors and XT60 Pigtail

Something you might want to consider doing earlier on in your build is to attach these capacitors because I soldered them onto the under underside of these boards. It's not impossible to do, it's just a little bit challenging because I had to solder it underneath. These capacitors came with these Speedybee ESCs and it also conveniently came with heat shrinks. Tthere are through holes for the capacitors on the ESC so you just have to slot them in. I didn't shorten the legs that much because I wanted them to be able to lay flat.

Now for the challenging part is to solder on our XT60 pigtail in a way that we are able to solder onto the to both escs at the same time. What I did was to strip the insulation expose a lot more of the wire than usual (about 1.5-2cm), so the exposed part can be soldered on to each ESC board.

Step 10: Mounting the Motors

As with most modern FPVMotors, the Meps King motors come with these 8mm socket head screws.That's great for usual frames that have like 4mm or 5mm arms like this because it's just the right length. However for this Frelon frame has these coaxial motor mounts which are really really too thin so if you you can't use the screws that come with the motor because they are too long. You'll need to source your own 4mm screws.

To screw down one of the coaxial motor mounts onto the arms, you'll need one of the longer screws. When you screw down the motors onto the coaxial motor mount make sure that you leave on the screw under the wires because it's pretty hard to get your hex driver in there.

In many of the builds for this Frelon frame, these motor mounts are mounted on the underside of uh of the of the arm and that is because it's to lower the center of gravity, but then you have your your stack mounted on your top plate and your battery on your bottom plate so it doesn't really make a difference anymore with this small 2mm or 3mm height difference. So I would rather put this on top because even if the screws come loose this motor mount is sitting on top of the arm so you have gravity going on for you. Whereas if it's mounted at the bottom and for some reason the screws or the nuts come loose then this is going to fall straight off because of gravity. Again I'd rather have this on top and even unscrewed it's not going to fall, unlike if you screw it on the bottom where you just need to lose any one of your nuts or your screws and you're done for.

Once that's all done you can just put on these socket head screws on top. I'm just hedging my bets making sure that I have physics going on for me. I mean it's not going to be the best in terms of it's a little bit elevated compared to the stack but I mean the center of gravity is all over the place anyway so it doesn't really make that much of a difference so I'd rather think about the safety of of my build.

Make sure you don't forget to put the soft mounts if you're planning to do so and as well as using threadlocker on your screws before tightening everything up. Ialso secured the motor wires with some zip ties so they're nice and tidy. Now that we've already screwed in everything we just need to plug all the motors and connect our peripherals and then connect this to Betaflight

Step 11: Weight Comparison to Quads

The Frelon comes out at around 448 grams, almost 450 grams, which doesn't include the props and the batteries but it's all built up and it's quite surprising that it's that light considering it has six motors. Just in comparison my Ummagawd Remix V2 with props and a GoPro mount comes out around 483 grams. Considering the Ummagawd has just four motors it's quite surprising actually that the Frelon is that light. My Cinebot30 weighs this one is lightweight so shouldn't weigh too much. This is 250 grams without a battery as well but with the Hawkeye 4K Thumb. It's pretty light all things considered and since we have six motors on here which is going to give us a pretty nice thrust to weight ratio.

With 1600g of thrust for each motor, and an all-up weight (AUW) of 740g with props, a LiPo battery, and antenna, that gives us a 13:1 thrust-to-weight ratio

Step 12: Betaflight Configuration

Note: At the time of my build, I was using Betaflight 4.3. Newer versions should be pretty similar so you can still follow along, but will have slight differences here and there.

Let's start up Betaflight and plug in our flight controller to our computer. And the first thing we'll need to do is to make sure your Frelon is on a level surface and click Calibrate Accelerometer. Notice the 3D model was upside-down because our flight controller is mounted upside down on our top plate.

Next we head on over to the Ports tab. Serial RX is set to UART2 where we have our receiver connected. Our VTX is wired up to UART1 so under Peripherals we set it to TBS Smart Audio. We're not gonna be using ESC telemetry so we disable it. And finally our GPS is hooked up to UART6 so under Sensor Input we set it to GPS. Click Save and Reboot

We then go to the Configuration tab and under Board and Sensor alignment, we set roll to 180 degrees because our flight controller is mounted upside down. We disable magnetometer because we don't have it, but we'll keep barometer on because our Speedybee flight controller has one built-in. You can put in a name for your build; I'm just gonna name this Hornet. Under motor beacon I like to have RX_Lost and RX_Set enabled even if I'm going to have a beeper installed anyway. Maximum arming angle set to 180 degrees. Inflight accelerometer calibration because I like to calibrate it every now and then. For GPS, we select the UBLOX Protocol, Auto Baud, Auto Config, Use Galileo, Set Home Point Once, and Ground Assistance Type to Auto-Detect, and then click Save and Reboot.

Going into the Motors tab under Mixer, most of you who fly only quads probably have never touched this before, but we're going to choose Y6 at the very bottom of the list. As you can see the motor order starts from the top-side motors 1, 2, and 3, and 4, 5, and 6 for the bottom-mounted motors. We'll need to click Save and Reboot first, then go back to the Motors tab later, but first on the Setup tab move your Frelon on all its axes and check if the 3D model is moving the same way. Back to the Motors tab, and we'll also need to plug in a battery to our Frelon (make sure you don't have props installed yet), then we click on Reorder Motors, tick I understand the risks, and click Start. One of the motors will start spinning in short intervals, and you just need to click which one it is on the diagram. Note that the top-mounted motors would appear nearer the center. We'll just do this for all motors and then click Save which will make the flight controller reboot. Back to the Motors tab again, this time we click Motor Direction. Once again tick I understand the risks, and choose Wizard or Individually depending on your preference. Wizard will basically spin all motors at the same time, and you can choose which ones to reverse direction, so I prefer choosing Individually instead. With this option, you can choose which motors spin, and by holding down the button it will keep spinning. You can now just feel with your fingers which direction the motor is spinning, and if it's not the same as the arrows on the diagram just click Normal or Reverse until you get the spin right. And then we just do that for the rest and hit Close when we're done.

Next up let's setup our VTX from the Video Transmitter tab. Here we'll need to load up the correct VTX tables, or the easier way would be to go to the Presets tab, and just look for a preset for the VTX you're using. In my case, I just searched for TBS Pro32, clicked on that, and clicked "Pick", Agree, then Save and Reboot. If we check back under the Video Transmitter tab, you'll see that the VTX tables are now loaded and the power levels are also properly set for our VTX. I prefer having low power disarm until first arm selected, and I will set my preferred band, channel, and power setting here as well before clicking Save.

For Modes, this will mainly boil down to your personal preference, so I'll just set my Arm, Angle mode for emergencies, Beeper, and Turtle Mode, and click Save.

For OSD, I'm just going to paste into CLI the same OSD I have on my other quads (here's what I use), and type in "Save". Then I head back to the OSD tab to make sure everything looks right. Note I have 3 different OSD profiles I can switch between with a switch, and I have a video about how to set this up here.

Finally, we enable Expert Mode so we can get into the Failsafe tab, and from here we just set our failsafe to GPS Rescue. I like setting my minimum distance to home to 50 meters which is the lowest setting, Allow Arming Without Fix, and also lowering the minimum satellites to 5. Now we just click Save and Reboot. Since we have a Speedybee stack, any changes we need to do, we can set up in the field with the Speedybee app.

Step 13: Losing a Prop in Flight, Conclusion, Etc.

About the props, we have bi-blade props on top and tri-blade props on the bottom. This provides better airflow and performance, which I can't really explain so I will let Kabab FPV explain it instead. Watch his video on Y6 bi-/tri-blade prop configuration here.

Out in the field, first we fly it in LOS just to see if the motors would get hot. Since, the motors stayed pretty cool, it was time for its first FPV flight, and you could see that this was cruising along happily at just 15-20% throttle, and that likely has something to do with its high thrust to weight ratio. I'm showing you some DVR footage so you can see exactly how this thing flies even at stock tune. It really flies stable in the air, and you really feel in control whether you're flying slow and smooth or pulling off some freestyle moves, and because of it's long flight times I bet we can do some long range and mountain surfing with this as well! This is now probably my 2nd favorite quad, but the noise levels probably aren't gonna endear me to my neighbors. Here's some footage from the GoPro as well so you can hear how the motors sound like. Pulling out of dives is no problem with this thing as we have plenty of power in our 6 motors. Overall, I am really liking this Frelon Y6 with these Meps motors. so do check out where you can get some of these down in the description.

At the risk of breaking something I removed one of the propellers just to see if this Y6 will fly with a failure of of one propeller or one motor. I set it to angle mode and went a safe distance away. It flew perfectly fine, and the motors aren't aren't really hot, so even if you lose one propeller and one motor, at the very least if you lose one propeller and one motor you're still going to be able to fly so that was quite a terrifying experience with a maiden of this Frelon Y6 build. Theoretically, you can lose up to 2 props/motors, as long as each arm still has at least 1 prop/motor.

The motors and the props were quite loud obviously as it has six motors and six props. The frequency of the noise is a little bit lower probably because of the bi-blades on top but performance-wise I was quite surprised because we are on stock filter, stock PIDs, but they flew quite nicely and quite stable in the air. I was pretty concerned at first that's why I flew this line of sight and did a couple of seconds hover but the motors weren't warm at all, they were just lukewarm. So thank you to Ludo Treize for creating this Y6 frame that's accessible to a lot of people. This comes in a variety of different sizes from 2" all the way to 10". The 2306 Motors really look great on on this Y6 and I really think that the efficiency of the motors really helps out; we've got good flight time on this thing doing more than 5 minutes on a standard 6S 1300mah LiPo. At 450 grams dry weight, it is pretty lightweight considering it has 6 motors and has plenty of thrust even with these motors which are not really meant for performance but since we have six of them we got a lot of power in this thing to spare.

Step 14: Video Version of This Instructable

In case you prefer watching this build on video, check out the 2 YouTube videos here