Category: Multi-Rotors

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Acro Quad Flight

Flying a quad or multi-rotor is a lot of fun.   Flying isn’t really the proper term though.  Like a  helicopter, they don’t ‘fly’ traditionally.   They simply beat the air into submission.

Collective pitch helicopters are hard, multi-rotors when tuned well are not.  But getting this proper tune and balance is hard.

Doing acrobatic maneuvers isn’t simple.   By design, multi-rotors have a flight controller that’s working really hard to keep the thing level and they often limit your ability to Roll or Pitch too far.   You have to turn that stuff off if you want to get jiggly with it.

An upside down multi rotor that’s no longer fighting gravity, and is instead assisting it, usually ends up badly as it plummets into the ground and breaks things.   It also can be really easy to lose your orientation.  If you’re upside down and your right is your left and/or your forward is aft.   Well, that’s generally not good.   The results usually suck.

We had a break in the weather and I finally got to spend some time really tossing my Armattan qaud around.    This thing is awesome.

Chris really makes an outstanding product.

My CNC 355 is using the Afro Acro Naze32 flight controller.   This is just a quad for quad’s sake.  No GPS, No compass, no other smarts other than accelerometer and gyro stabilization which can be turned off and/or tuned.   And fine tuning we will do.

Getting Jiggly with my Armattan CNC 355 Quad

 

It’s tough as nails.  I’ve crashed it multiple times, usually only losing props, which are cheap.  I’ve bent arms, and you just bend them back.   Might need to take them off to really straighten them but you can just bend them back as you’ll see at the end of the video.

If you have a Blade or a Phantom and you want more performance and don’t want to stop buying plastic parts.   Buy an Armattan Quad.   You won’t regret it.

Building flight skills apparently just takes time.  There is no magic pill.   I think, or at least hope I’m over the hump cause crashing sucks, and crashing you will do when you start doing stuff like this.   Also, trees are still the enemy.

Not even 24 hours later and we have snow again.

But I just had to test the PID and Rate changes I made after yesterday’s fight above.

Freshly balanced props too.   Wow, so much more responsive, pretty easy to flip and roll without losing altitude.

On quad camera, front porch launch cause I’m not dressed for the weather 🙂
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More Hex Gimbal Footage

Last weekend was a good multi-rotor weekend.  Got to fly my high-performance quad a few times without incident.  Also flew my Franken-QX350 a bunch.  Each of the kids got a turn too.   All without incident.

Finally got spend some time getting the hex to fly right.  It would fly great in stabilized mode but loiter was broken, and if loiter is broken, none of the autonomous flight modes are available.  Well, they are available but you’ll just crash so it was in my best interest to get that fixed.    Turns out, somewhere along the way my compass orientation flag had changed form 8 which is roll-180, to 10, which is roll-180 yaw 90.   Honestly the way things are mounted I think they should be roll 180 yaw 270, but since it works just rolled, I’m leaving it that way.

For what it’s worth, my APM is mounted like this.

APMOrientation

After a handful of manual flights and confident that loiter was fixed, I launched it a few times and flew it using droid planner.  Guiding it to fly here, then over there, and then over there.

Still have some Video Jello-issues to work out.   Looks/feels like electrical interference from something, likely with the Gimbal.

Super long video for my own amusement.

More DJI Hex, Gimbal enabled footage. Still working out some bugs.
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First F550 Gimbal enabled flights

Today I had an opportunity to pop outside, fly and document the snow.   This was the first opportunity I had to fly with the Gimbal that was mounted for the Go Pro in the previous blog post.   The Beholder-Lite gimbal.

It seems I never have a completely uneventful flight though.  While this one doesn’t contain any crashes, the gyro calibration was off and it wouldn’t position hold at all.   Loiter was completely broken, so the majority of the video was flow in stability mode.  With the ~12-14 mile per hour winds and the fact that it didn’t really know what level was, it got real interesting when I lost orientation.   Thankfully, no broken parts.

I’m mostly happy with the video, it was super bright, sun was out and obviously the snow just amplifies that which alone can cause some Jell-O effect.  But the gimbal isn’t tuned 100% right either.  I’ll work on that in the future.    Also need to balance my blades.

But all in all a very successful day.

DJI F550 Hex, Beholder-Lite Gimbal, v2.

The video is a bit long as it’s really two flights.  It’s HD so pop it out to full screen for the best effect.  I haven’t found a way to kill the high pitched sound from the motors/electronics in the video so I just kill the sound.  Just hum your favorite tune while you watch this.  Smile

Enjoy,

-=MD

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Camera gimbal tilt with APM

Installed a Beholder-Lite Gimbal on my Hex this weekend.   The Beholder is a simple AlexMoss based gimbal that’s self sustaining.  All you need to is give it +5v (or in my case hook it up to power distribution and you’re set).

Once I had it mounted I thought, wow I’d like to be able to control the tilt so I ventured off to search the internets, but my google-fu failed me.   Mission planner and what I read said that APM was set up to control servo-based gimbals.  This is a brushless gimbal, and I don’t want APM to control it.   Only allow me to control the tilt of it so that when I’m filming I can tilt the camera down.

So after a little experimentation here is what I’ve got.

The Gimbal came with a cable and the weak documentation simply showed this:

board_connector

 

So I poked around some more and found where I could plug those into the APM and in fact did so on the top. In A10 and A11, now I really don’t care about Roll, but I plugged it in anyway.

Continue reading “Camera gimbal tilt with APM”

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And Finally, a good hex video flight.

This is what I’ve been after, albeit an abbreviated flight plan.

This is just a GoPro Camera attached to the hex, with a pretty weak anti-vibration mount and it’s OK.  Someday I’ll add a gimbal.

This flight is void of:

  • Crashing
  • Mission Planner Meters: Written as Feet, causing contact with trees.
  • Manually piloting into trees.

So yeah, take off, film, land.   Goodness.

Finally a good hex flight.

There was one scary moment, which is shown at then end as an out-take.

While the auto-flight path was happening, I set the controller down to do something.  When I did that, I bumped a switch ‘RTL’ I think, and it about fell out of the sky.   I was able to grab the controller, gain control and restart the mission.

Happy Multi-Rotoring.