05 Motor connectors
Now it's time to solder on the connectors you'll need to power the board, run the motors, and get the signal from the R/C receiver. For a tiny board like this, we suggest using .015" solder and a pencil-tip on your iron, to avoid the blobbing you can get with thicker solder or a screwdriver tip.
If you prefer to solder your motor wires directly to the flight controller, you can skip this step; however, we've found that using tiny "Picoblade" Molex connectors makes it easier to swap out motors. (As discussed here, you'll also see these connectors referred to erroneously as JST.) If you're going to use these connectors, you'll want to attach them now, because it will be more difficult to solder them to the board once you've attached the battery connector and the receiver.
Here's a photo of the board with all four motor connectors attached. (The different coloring of the connectors on opposite sides is meaningless; those are just the connectors that I pulled out of the bag.) Note that for the proper polarity, the holes on the connectors face in:
Getting the connectors to stick to the board while you're soldering them is a cinch if you use a little piece of Blue-Tack to hold the board down:
The image above shows one of the four connectors soldered onto the LadybugFC. Note the clean separation between the two solder joints on the connector. Even if you're careful, it's possible accidentally to solder a "bridge" between the two connector pins, causing a dangerous short-circuit:
If this happens, you can usually remove the bridge by gently swiping the soldering tip between the bridged connectors. For a really big, blobby bridge you may be better off using a solder sucker to remove all the solder and trying again.
Next: Receiver connection