Tag: DJI F550

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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.

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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.

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Hex Crash II (Feet or Meters?)

So fresh off my last crash flight, I rebuilt the HEX, made up some ghetto landing gear from the other broken landing gear and had flown it successfully (manually) a few times.

Time to try another autonomous flight.

So the plan was pretty simple, a nice routine flight around our perimeter.

theMission

Batteries charged, I headed out to basically waypoint (1), or home.   Where I launched it manually, hovered it, the flipped it into Auto-mode to execute the flight plan.

Continue reading “Hex Crash II (Feet or Meters?)”

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Multi-Rotors, a new hobby.

Long story short.   I’ve have wanted to get into RC helicopters for a long time, but they are hard, real hard to fly.  At least the cool collective pitch types that have the most maneuverability and seem like the most fun.   A buddy of mine tried, and gave up.  Then he found multi-rotors, and the Ardupilot platform and started building.

I initially acquired a Blade Nano QX for use in the office to learn to fly, and because it’s cheap and easy fun.  Almost indestructible.

Then I picked up a Blade QX350, which is awesome, but not programmable, or missionable.  But it has ‘safe’ modes, is GPS aware and will return to launch with the flip of a switch.

On Thursday, I built a Ardupilot based DJI F550 Hex with Jason.

DJI Hex

We assembled it in one day and test hovered it by 3:30pm in the afternoon.   This was only doable because Jason has built a couple of these and spent countless hours figuring out the nuances.   I am forever grateful for that.  I’m sure he saved me much frustration.

So we built it on Thursday and flew it a little bit.   And by a little bit, I mean hovered a little, tested a few modes, but didn’t get out of his back yard and not more than 30 feet off the ground or more than 30 feet away from me.

This morning that changed.

I was able to get it out and fly a bit in the front yard.   Living on 16 acres has it’s advantages.   I was able to exercise a couple modes.  Standard stability, Stability with simple, the new Drift mode as well as test return to launch.

This Google Earth plot shows everywhere we went, using the actual mission planner GPS data.

HexFirstFlight

I don’t have a camera mounted to it yet, but Molly took a little video of it with my phone.

DJI F550 Hexcopter first real flight.

Some video footage (raw) from a QX350 flight last weekend is here:

Blade QX350 with Contour HD camera mounted.

We were flying the Blade QX last weekend on the edge of that nasty storm.  It was surprisingly stable in up-to 30mph gusts.    It was blowing like crazy but stability mode really kept it controllable.  Pretty amazing actually.

I would never have tried that with the new F550 but the blade is rock solid in conditions like this.

Until next time.