multi-rotor – Page 2

March 28, 2014March 28, 2014

Saving a Lotus T580+P (Part 3)

So following up on:

Saving a Lotus Part 1 and Saving a lotus Part 2

And that didn’t take long. Sadly no video. No kids were willing to come out and do the camera work.

Bottom line, it flew and flew pretty well. Big and slow. 14” props, yeah, not my kind of machine. I flew it for a good 10 minutes, then decided to try a couple different modes on the Naze32 flight controller, tipped it over a foot of the ground and broke a prop. So it’s done.

It would be fine if I could source the props, but I didn’t like this enough to a new matching set since I can’t find the originals plus spares to keep this thing in the air. So I’ll re-use the parts, probably chop up the CF frame and use it for other things.

So there you have it. Multi-Rotors, the hobby. About 6 hours give or take, of hard work mixed with fun, for about 10 minutes of flight time. Certainly if I had more spare parts, I’d get a better return on investment than that. But c’est la vie.

Still it’s better than spending 6 hours at a steel match where I actually only get to shoot for about 64 seconds Winking smile

-MD

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 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.