Gremlin Micro Quad Turtle Mode Setup Tutorial

One of the biggest inconveniences about crashing micro-quads is that they get stuck upside down. These little race drones take hit after hit but can usually just carry on flying! That is if they remain upright. To avoid the tedious process of taking off your goggles, exposing your eyes to the bright light of the outside world and heading on over to your downed quad on foot, here is a solution: Turtle Mode. This is how you set it up.

You will need:

Your Gremlin
Tools for disassembling your Gremlin
Solder and a soldering iron
Wire cutters
Some spare thin gauge wire
A flight battery (probably a 2s)
A laptop or computer
A USB cable for connecting your quad to the laptop
About thirty minutes (which is approximately how long you'll need)

Before we get started, here's one of our videos that will help you with some basic skills. You'll need most of these for carrying out these modifications. So, if you're not too keen on soldering and all of those other scary things, check it out.

Okay, ready? Let's get started. Here is a breakdown of the steps in the video as a quick reference guide. Take it one step at a time and don't worry about the bigger picture. It will all fall into place.

Physical Rewiring Stage

1) Disassemble your micro-quad

This may involve cutting off some electrical tape that surrounds your ESC. After this, go ahead and remove the heatsink around one of your ESC's. Try to choose the ESC closest to your PPM pad on the control board.

2) Unsolder the leads attaching one of your ESC's to the main control board.

3) Tin ends of the piece of wire you set aside earlier

4) Remove the old signal wire

5) Connect the new wire from your ESC to the PPM pad

You'll want to tin the pads first and then solder the wire to each surface.

6) Get a new section of heat-shrink and cover your ESC with it.

Quick Tip! Using a heating tool like the one we used in the video is far easier than using a lighter like many people do. You might want to invest in one if you're soldering regularly.

7) Solder the ESC ground and power wires back onto the flight controller board.

8) Solder your newly attached wire to the PPM pad.

Holding the wire with some sort of implement to help get it in the right place is really useful.

9) Re-apply electrical tape to the ESC and reassemble the quad frame.

And we're done with the physical 'build' segment of this step-by-step process. Congratulations! Next, you will use your computer to configure settings in the software to finish setting up your Turtle Mode.

Software Phase

For this phase, you're going to need to watch the part of the video which will guide you through each change you need to make to the code inside the software. By the way, the software we use is Beta Flight, so this is a guide for that particular program that is currently available here.

To save you scrolling through the video to find each step of the programming phase of this tutorial, this link will take you to the beginning of the process.

With that, boom! You'll have a great flying quad all set up with the added feature of Turtle Mode! Sit back, chill out, and let the quad do all the work - even when it's crashed. Say goodbye to the walk of shame.

Finally, before you go, check out this vlog where we first used Turtle Mode to great effect. It's so helpful and definitely worth the many steps of this tutorial.