Gaui 330X S Quadcopter

This is the third quadcopter I've bought, and also the smallest. It's funny really because when I was researching which quadcopter to buy for about two months I was all but convinced I was going to try the Gaui 330X, but for some reason I changed my mind and bought an xAircraft x650 instead.

The other funny thing about my Gaui 330x purchace is that I hated it for the first week I had it because I couldn't get the stupid thing to fly. It would either flip over or wobble about in the air like something from an old sci fi B movie.

This changed when I configured each motor and ESC (electronic speed controller) one at a time, as suggested by someone at rcgroups.com, and I went over the instructions again and realised I'd missed some settings for my radio regarding the gyro gain.

Since that time I've totally fallen in love with it. My Gaui 330X S has gone from being the runt of the litter to my most used quadcopter. It's small size makes it ideal for making videos around the medieval town where I live and any small spaces, and I've managed to do some pretty cool stuff with it.

Also, perhaps due to luck, I haven't managed to break it yet in over a month! Well I've had a few a scrapes and lost a few screws (I since learned to always use thread-lock), crashed a few times, but this little quadcopter keeps coming back for more.

I made a few modifications to the stock additions I fitted: I bought the blue and yellow foam surround protection system, which does save the props a lots but is really annoying with the flimsy plastic connection pieces - so I just trimmed the whole lot down to just little stumps sticking out beyond the props and it still protects them.

I also bought the Gaui 330X camera mount that comes with four straight legs for landing gear. The camera mount is okay but the legs are useless - they just stick into the ground and topple the 330X over when you land with any sort of forward motion, which you must do most of the time. This is why you need skids and not chair legs, they're called skids for an reason -  so you can skid.

Next I bought the wide skids, which are great but they aren't high enough to accomodate the camera mount so I bought a strip of aluminium from B and Q, cut it into two halves and bent them into undercarriage shapes and screwed the skids I bought to the aluminium. I made holes in the aluminium strips to screw the whole lot onto where the useless stock wheels are supposed to screw into. I've also put some pipe lagging foam on the skids for softer landings - I do this with all my quadcopters so they don't bumps as much on hard surfaces when landing.

The video below was made because, like a fool, I'd forgotten to take the onboard, Gopro, camera with me so I just fooled around instead and my collegue recorded that, which I thought would be useful for this Gaui 330X S quadcopter hangar page..