After a hard days work, prepping the property for the ‘Hen Fest 2014’, I got to get the Tri Copter out for some fun after a little storm blew through.
Enjoy…
More Tri-Copter goodness.
Tri-Copter Fun Flying.
Tossed the legacy Contour HD camera on the Tri-Copter today. Keep in mind this is pretty much hard mounted and there is no gimbal so it’s not nearly as smooth as previous Dead-Cat, or Hex Gimbal videos.
Details of the build are here in Part 1 and Part 2
Some video from two different batteries.
SimpleCopter Tri-Copter 2.0
Hanging where it rests…
I would most definitely FPV this thing. It flies that well… A smidge under powered with the Contour HD but that’s a heavy camera. FVP gear is next up on the list, that and finishing the micro 3D Printed quad that I have almost all the parts for.
New wheels for mamma.
So we’ve been looking for a good used car for Molly for a while, and yes we’re still looking but this popped up yesterday. Claudine had driven one when were looking for cars for me an liked it. So we ran to go see it and bought it.
It’s a one owner, 2005 Ford Freestyle, with 71k miles. Very well taken care of by the original owner and we have every receipt for everything. Deals like these don’t come along often but they are out there if you look for them.
Keeping with the Dave Ramsey, no Debt, pay cash for everything strategy, we used our ‘Car Fund’ and bought this. Again, a fully loaded vehicle, the only option it’s missing is a DVD player and with iPhones and iPads that’s not a necessity. In fact nobody really wants to look at a DVD player from 2005 anyway.
So this replaces the 2003 Pontiac Minivan that we bought in 2010. We actually bought two GM cars that day. My first and my last. We still have it, it runs and the AC works. As soon as we find something for Molly we’ll sell it and likely recoup some of our cash. It will make a great mini-van, people hauler for someone.
So we’re looking forward to getting a number of good years out of this. Claudine is so happy to not be driving a minivan, specifically that minivan. I think she’d be happy in a Honda or Toyota or something not GM.
So we have this Ford, which is actually Volvo drivetrain as I understand it. It runs great, drives great and so far we’re really happy.
Tri-Copter Proof of Life
OK, I got some tail swivel parts from my buddy, and got her all back together.
In reality the left arm is still broken, just wedged in the body for this demo proving that she does fly.
Tri-Copter / SimpleCopter Proof of Life
This thing is going to be loads of fun once I get the arm fixed and a few things touched up.
Like adding some color to it for orientation and some lights.
More later.
Tri-Copter for the Win!
The Tri-Copter Part II
So about a month ago I started putting together my SimpleCopter Tri-Copter.
So in part (1) I had started to migrate the crash parts from my HongKong F330 acro knock off over to it.
The HK330 was a lot of fun, super stable, rock solid actually, provided you didn’t smash it into the ground. Honestly it crashed pretty well too, but I’d had a few crashes, some hard enough that it pulled the pads off of a couple of the ESC’s. I’d repaired them but finally one was ruined, so now down to (3) of them I decided to migrate it over to the Tri-Copter.
For what it’s worth… I’m using DJI 980KV knock off motors, they have keyed prop adapters built in, and I have lots of DJI props so it seemed like a good plan. My Armattan quad uses 1800kv motors (faster), and the SimpleCopter guy recommends 1400KV motors. but 1000kv with larger props should accomplish about the same thing but won’t be quite as ‘nimble’. Less hot rod like.
Why am I telling you this? Cause sometimes you should just use what the guys recommend. Had I just ordered up 3 new motors, I could have built this by now. My motors don’t have mounts, so I needed to order those and I needed to order them 2x because the orders kept getting screwed up. This literally cost me a month of waiting.
While I really dig the selection and pricing from readytoflyquads.com, the guy is a one man band and while I don’t really have an issue waiting 2-3 weeks for some things, when that order is fulfilled wrong, and things now take 5-6 weeks that starts to irritate me. To his credit he made things right.
So this is a story where you get what you pay for and sometimes trying to save a buck only costs you more in the long run.
This weekend I finally received my motor mount, which was the missing component to be able to use the fancy tilt block that my buddy 3D Printed.
I had what I thought was a really good plan… Put the ESC’s under the Body and made up some really sweet extension cables from the motors to the ESC’s with bullet connectors. Got it all together. Configured the flight controller, calibrated the ESC’s and was just about ready to put the props on and take it for a spin.
I picked it up, and since this thing is kind of big, (and foldable) I folded it. But the way I had routed the wires, it just pulled the bullet connectors off the ESCs. Drats. These were already salvaged ESC’s, meaning I’d broken the connectors off before and soldered them back on, sometimes to the regulator itself. This was no good and ruined one of the 3 remaining functional ESC’s. So, I had the motors mounted, but now was short at least one ESC.
I remembered I had ordered 4 ESC’s for another quad I wanted to build so I started to swap them all out.
This time putting the front one’s on the arms, and changing the extension cables to the other side of the ESC with pull apart bullet connectors.
As murphy would have it, one of these ESC’s was bad, when I plugged in the battery to configure it, the magic smoke was let out and it also fried my flight controller 
So, using my remaining ESC, and remaining spare Flight Controller I was finally in business ready to fly.
The first test flight went really really well. (Sorry no video, kids were tied up.)
After a couple short test flights I was ready to turn up the gains, tweak the pids and get more aggressive.
I took it out to the field and started to get Jiggy with it. On my first Flip, something broke, I think it was the 3D printed swivel thing. It started flat-spinning like a Frisbee, from about 30 meters.
Boom.
The Damage:
– One tilt swivel
– One Arm, the beauty of which is I can buy 8 feet of this 1/2 x 1/2 inch material from the hardware store for next to nothing.
– And of course, instead of separating at the bullet connector, one of the bullet connectors ripped off the ESC. But I think I can fix that.
I *think* the flight controller survived, though some pins were bent but we’ll find out soon enough.
With some luck we’ll be flying again after the weekend.