Hobby King Control Board Programming

Last time I left you all with the motors and ESCs mounted... that leaves a lot to do.  The first thing you'll need to do is decide what configuration you'll want to fly your quadcopter with.  I decided to go with the classic X-quad configuration, which is shown here:

Two classic quadcopter configurations.

The X-quadcopter configuration seems to be more popular and is the I decided to go with.  There are many different firmware versions that you can load up on your control board, but I decided to go with the X-quadcopter configuration v4.7 by KapteinKuk, which you can get from Hobby King under the link to the control board on the files tab (files seem to only be linked under the international warehouse, but you can still get them).  Once you get that file you'll need to download Atmel Studio version 6.0 and upload all of the settings that are listed in the manual - it takes a while, but it's easy enough.  Remember, you'll need the USB programming card to do this - this can also be purchased at Hobby King.

Once you upload the firmware you'll be ready to hook up all the electronics and assemble the frame, which I'm covering in the next post.