Multi-Rotors – Page 3

March 23, 2014March 23, 2014

FPV, Let the games begin

FPV (First Person View)

It’s all JD’s fault, he dragged me into this. As mentioned in a previous post he jumped into the deep end of the pool by purchasing a Team Blacksheep Discovery Pro frame. This frame is sweet, and includes a 2 Axis Gimbal built into the front of the frame.

Initially he just opted for the frame, we built that, he test flew it, but we didn’t hook up the Gimbal. He finally plugged it in but the roll motor was DOA.

Last weekend he was supposed to come fly with me but tore into it, ran into some soldering trouble, then crashed it during a test flight. I asked him to give it to me, I’d put it back together and get his gimbal back in business. I exchanged a few emails with TBS and the are sending us a motor. I should have that Monday.

In the mean time, JD picked up the TBS / FatShark FPV system. I told him I’d install that for him while I was fixing/cleaning up his other mess.

Still waiting for the Gimbal motor, I decided to go ahead and install the aforementioned FPV goodness.

All and all it was pretty straight forward once I got the camera mount and cables. JD had the pieces, he just neglected to give them to me.

I did manufacture a bracket for the video transmitter. It’s a tad ghetto but it will do the trick.

The results are amazing. I took me quite a while to get my controller set up. Previous to today I had 0 experience with Naza flight controllers. It took some time, research and I can’t wait to test fly this tomorrow.

This is going to be so much fun.

This is a really nice quad copter.

Proof video is working, and other shots of how things are assembled.

March 16, 2014March 16, 2014

Multi-Rotor Madness

Saturday March 15th was awesome. The weather was perfect and nobody was home but me. The perfect opportunity to get outside and do some flying. A buddy was supposed to come up and partake but he had “issues”, so it was a solo day.

First we spent some quality time with the Armattan, my current sport quad.

Some sporty flying…

After burning up a few batteries with that, I moved on to my newer “Dead Cat” Quad. Built from a cheap frame upgraded with legit DJI arms, and utilizing PixHawk for the flight controller.

It flies awesome. It’s not a hot rod by any stretch, but it will flip and roll too. I had some issues testing the acro mode in Arducopter 3.1.2-r2 so I’m waiting for 3.2 before I try it again. I don’t have a good camera mount for it yet, no gimbal, nor FPV gear so I ‘temporarily’ attached the ContourHD camera to the front. All and all for as ghetto as the mount was it did pretty good.

Dead Cat with ContourHD

I ran it through a bunch of different flight modes. Even executed a pretty significant autonomous flight. Had some fun with guided mode from the tablet too. Thought I almost lost it too.

In guided mode I flew it out over the pond at the gravel pit, then over to the east, then asked it to come back, and well, it was trying but while it technically wasn’t beyond visual flight distance, I couldn’t see it from where I was standing.

It was apparently on the fringe of my telemetry radio’s range. At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I did eventually flip “Return to Launch” and it came back. So all is well.

I also got out the Hex, which has the gimbal installed. I still need to fix the Jell-O-cam issue which seems very EFI’ish to me. But still, this hex is a stable flier.

Hex Gimbal Footage

So this was an all around very awesome multi-rotor day. I can’t wait to get the FPV gear and get going. I really can’t wait to get my hands on a TBS Discovery Pro frame.

March 14, 2014March 16, 2014

Saving a Lotus T580+P (Part 1)

A little background first.

Multi-Rotors are cool, after playing with the blade 350QX and my DJI based Hex I thought I wanted a larger, more stable camera platform. I thought I wanted a Carbon Fiber frame.

Clearly I didn’t do enough research when this thing was acquired. If you search the interwebs you’ll find some pretty glowing reviews of this flying turd. If you search harder you’ll find some more honest reviews.

It’s a turd.

I kind of, sort of knew this going in, but I also figured worst case scenario, I’d just gut it and use the frame. After all the price was right, it was cheap.

Well turns out, that’s what I’m going to do. Actually that’s what I have to do because out of the box, this thing didn’t even make it off the bench before showing it’s true colors.

This is a larger Quad that swings 14” props, via some Large 400KV motors.

So it comes pre-assembled, all folded up in the box.

All you really need do is slap a 4 channel or better receiver on it, a battery and go. So that’s what I did, only if you dig around the net, you’ll find out these things have a ‘flip of death’ problem. This thing is not going to survive a hard crash, it’s just not that stout.

Simply during testing on the bench w/o props, I could get a motor to lose sync with the ESC. A proprietary 4 in 1 ESC. So there’s really no point in even trying to get it off the ground.

Under the lid is a really, really poorly put together 4:1 ESC, and flight controller.

A flight controller and ESC you have absolutely no control over. As in none it is not user tunable. For a copter that was originally supposed to be in the $500+ range but can be had for $300 this is still a POS. (There are I think, 3 versions of this each claims to fix the ESC flip of death issue, but obviously that’s not the case). There are better frames and components to be had, which probably explains why they don’t really make these or even have them on their website anymore. They can be found on eBay and some sites, but save yourself the trouble and bypass this.

So what are we going to do?

We have a decent frame, not great but decent. It’s billed as foldable, but you still need tools, to remove the landing gear in order to fold it.

It has motors, that seem decent, although it’s possible that it’s not the ESC and could be a motor that’s bad and if so, I doubt I can get a replacement and I’d have to replace all 4 so that they match. The motor mounts are weak, and will likely pop in even a modest crash. If it really needs a motor, this things will get cut into CF pieces to be used elsewhere and then at that point, even a the low cost of entry it will still be a loss. One of those life lessons.

So we’re going to try and make this air worthy.

We’ll replace the ESC, in fact I’m going to use this one:

The build has started:

I’m on the fence as to what flight controller to use. I really like the Afro Acro Naze32 that’s mounted on my Armattan CNC 355 Quad.

But for something this size for use with a camera or photography (read a docile flying machine, non acrobatic). I’m pretty sure I want GPS assist for loiter mode and other features. So I’m considering a FULL Naze32, or maybe even another APM or Pixhawk setup.

The later is kind of pricey, about $400 all said and done just in flight controller, GPS, and telemetry radios. But if the experiment fails, well I can fork lift that to something else. I should be able to do the same with the Naze for about 1/2 of that perhaps less.

Maybe I’ll just toss a $25 afro acro naze, on it, fly it a bit and if it survives that then I’ll upgrade it. I really don’t expect that it will take much of a crash to completely destroy this frame.

So currently the build is stalled waiting for a flight controller to free up. A Naze is on order for now, but we’ll see. I’ll post an update when this project progresses.

Happy multi-rotoring and remember; “Friends don’t let Friends buy LotusRC products”.

March 10, 2014March 11, 2014

The Dead Cat Quad

Yesterday was a good multi-rotor day. I spent the day with my buddy building quads and putting together my ”Dead Cat” or Alien Quad, while he assembled his High Dollar Team BlackSheep Quad.

Basically the same basic layout, a Quadcopter, where the front arms are spread more than the rear, to allow for better camera clearance from the props (as in getting them out of the picture).

The ultimate goal will be to make these FPV or First Person View fliers.

Two completely different approaches. He, plopping down major cash for a TBS kit, with TBS motors and ESC’s. The TBS board, with integrated gimbal is amazingly well done. The onboard core will be outstanding when finished. He set it up yesterday migrating a Naza flight controller he already had.

I on the other hand was going the cheaper route. A simple frame. I was still waiting for some parts, so I robbed/borrowed ESC’s and motors from a failed DJI F550 hex build that he had on hand. I did however use my shiny new PixHawk flight controller, 3DR Ublox GPS and 3DR telemetry radios. Basically the same gear I have on my Hex, with the exception of the newer PixHawk over APM 2.6 I’ll have some pretty significant comments about the PixHawk towards the end.

This is a super cheap frame ($25.00 on amazon, complete with knock off arms), I’ll replace those with legit arms after the first crash, and when I really go FPV, I’ll probably upgrade to the TBS plates minus the gimbal.

It turned out pretty nice and flies pretty well, still needs to be tuned but it’s too windy today.

I tossed some DJI Landing gear on it so that I could mount the battery underneath. Without the camera gear up front, putting the batter in the back where it’s supposed to go simply wrecked the center of gravity. In FPV mode that won’t be the case.

PixHawk Critiques and Observations

I so want to like APM, and I so want to support 3DR but they are making it harder every day.

APM, on my APM 2.6 Flight controller works pretty well. I know it’s basically out of resources so they are moving to PixHawk. I know BeagleBone will be 100x better and that’s coming. I know they are trying to make this ‘consumer friendly’.

It’s not plug and play, at least with 3.1.2 copter code, there are too many hoops to jump through, to many places you have to rub your head and your belly in opposite directions at the same time. Maybe these are mission planner issues, but they don’t exist with my APM and they do with PixHawk. Connecting, downloading, fetching parameters and logs. It works, oh about half the time. Try to do something more than once and you’ll probably have to reboot the PixHawk. I know it’s “Open Source”, but some of this is pretty stinking buggy. No other way to say it.

The PixHawk is noisy, too noisy and by that I mean too many sounds, and beeps. My ESC’s hate life until you push and hold the button. Maybe this is their way to make ‘drones’ more conspicuous. It’s just an annoyance. We should be able to turn the sounds down or off. We should also be able to make my ESC’s happy, pre button push.

Speaking of the button. The button is dumb. I have to pre-arm the PixHawk with a button push and hold before I can arm it? What the hell? A lawyer probably made them add this.

Ok fine, put the button in/on the PixHawk, allow the remote button if and only if you need a remote button. I don’t, so it’s one more thing to mount, one more set of wires to route and tend too. But let me, as a non-novice, disable this silly preflight, preflight check.

I don’t hate the case, others do, in fact someone’s already making square non-sexy case for it. I actually like it.

I do like the LED’s, tons of them. The status LED is really nice. But if I can see that, I can push it, that remote button should have a multi-color LED like the top. So when you remote mount it you get the light where you can see it.

OK, I think my batteries should be charged…

Update: 03/11/2014

OK, so on assembly day, it got dark, all we could do was hover it, and it was clear there that the battery w/o camera in the battery slot was bad. It was woefully out of balance.

So I put landing gear on it to put the battery underneath. It flew, in fact in Stability mode it flew just fine. It loitered OK too, and looking the logs, vibrations on the PixHawk were all OK too (under +/- 3). The darn thing would NOT auto-tune. I chalked it up to being windy Sunday, too windy.

Today was a different story. Nice and calm. It still would NOT complete an Auto-tune. It would ‘finish’ but if I tried to switch back and forth between the pre and auto-tuned values, it would drop like a rock, get hung up in it’s own prop wash and crash. Luckily after 3 attempts the only thing I broke was a single landing leg. After looking at logs, I just couldn’t decide if this frame sucked that bad, or if PixHawk was just crap. It’s less than ideal for a product that was supposed to ship in Sept/Oct of 2013. It’s now March and it’s still less than polished. So on a whim, I decided I had spare arms, let’s replace this HJ DJI knock off arms with legit DJI arms. So that’s what I did.

WOW, that’s all I can say is WOW, with stock pids, it’s amazing. Now I’ll try an auto-tune.

So yeah, when you read in the internets that the HK knock off arms are bad. Believe that player. While they don’t look or feel horrible, they just are.

March 8, 2014

More Multi-Rotor Fun.

First, the weather was mild Thursday Night so I slapped my legacy ContourHD camera onto my Armattan “Sport Quad” for some sunset flipping and rolling. Working on some acro skills.

Armattan CNC 355 Quad.

Then after getting home Saturday. I went outside with Matthew and let him get some stick time on the Franken Quad. Once he got bored, I noticed the Hex was calling me. So I fired up Mission Planner and decided to pick up where I left off when I hit the trees.

Plotted out a new autonomous route, verified the feet/meters settings, and let her rip.

No music in this vid, only prop and wind noise.

DJI F550 Hex, APM 2.6 running Arducopter 3.1.2

Certainly open to suggestions for the Jello video. It seems EFI related and once you get flying is almost gone, but when the Hex is just sitting there, it’s bad real bad.