ok so ive been flying whoops for about a year and finally decided to step up to a proper 5inch freestyle build. picked up a TopSky frame (the stretch x version) and grabbed a Speedybee F7 stack because someone on here recommended it a few months back. frame showed up yesterday and ive been staring at it trying to figure out the stack mounting situation.

the issue is the stack screws that came with the frame are 30.5x30.5 but the standoffs feel super wobbly after i torque them down, like theres a bit of play in the whole stack assembly. not sure if i need nylon standoffs instead of the metal ones or if this is just how it is until i put the top plate on. also the ESC has like 8 pads on the bottom and im not sure which ones are for the motor outputs vs the power leads ? the diagram in the manual is kind of garbage honestly.

coming from tiny whoops where everything is just plug and play this is a bit of a learning curve. anyone been through this before?

the wobble thing is totally normal until the top plate is on, the stack kind of self-aligns once everything is sandwiched together. dont overtighten the standoffs before that or you risk cracking the PCB ? finger tight plus maybe a quarter turn is enough at that stage.

for the ESC pads, the big chunky pads near the corners are your battery positive and negative, you'll want to solder your main power leads there with decent gauge wire, 14awg at minimum for a 5inch. the smaller pads labeled M1-M4 are motor outputs, just match them to the motor numbering in betaflight's motor tab and you can always reverse direction in software if you get the spin direction wrong. the current sensor pad and the uart pads are usually along one edge, speedybee labels them pretty clearly once you zoom in on the silkscreen with a phone camera.

went through basically the same thing with my first real build last spring. one thing that saved me was just pulling up Oscar Liang's wiring guide for whatever stack i had, even if its not exact same board the general layout is almost always the same. also get some flux if you dont have any, makes soldering those motor pads so much cleaner, i was fighting blobs and cold joints for ages before someone told me that