We took advantage of the good weather today and hit Sharon Woods for some family photos. Of course everyone got along and nobody died so it was successful 
Kind of a family, engagement photos for Maggie, and senior photos for Molly.
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.
More Gimbal Footage
A simple flight
I was super-windy… 15-20mph winds and this quad with gimbal is a tad underpowered.
Was still a good flight (read: No Crashes) and no APM Pixhawk issues. At least not this time. That was the reason I had set it aside for a while. APM still has some issues.
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.
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.