Small TCopter for learning to do flips

A flitetest article I did on my small Tcopter build.

http://flitetest.com/articles/small-tricopter-for-acro-training

Bad weekends flying

You have some days where you should just give up. I had one of those on Sunday. I have a chance to go and fly in a park. So I decided to take only the tricopter and try to get some footage. I packed the Tri up in the car with the camera and 5 batteries.  Trundled off to the park, get all set to fly.. start the camera. NO SD card .... grrrr.

Oh well lets go for a fly anyway. Flying very happily and then with the Tri about 100 meters away I lose orientation of the tri. I try to figure it out but Im only getting further away. I decide to try and land. Well the landing ended up been a lawn dart as the below picture shows. This was all on the first battery.

I should have stopped there. But no I went back and got the quad, and the SD card to try and fly again, in a different spot. I had a few glitches with the gimbal initialising, but finally got it sorted and took off for a the first flight. All going well, doing a sweeping turn see lamp post, mental note don't hit it. Carry on the turn smack right into the bloody lamp post. I could not believe it. I normally would not have been able to hit it even if I was trying.  So another broken bird, and yes that to was on the first battery.

Picture of the nasty pole that jumped out and attacked my quad !!

Broken props, still need to test everything else.

Video evidence of my stupidity.. idiot !! 

So I now have 2 broken multirotors to fix.

Tricopter Rebuild

After the above lawn dart landing / crash I decided to rebuild the tricopter. This is the second time in a crash that a motor wire has pulled right off the ESC board. So in the rebuild I wanted to protect them better and also centralise the weight to the body to make broken arm repairs easier.

The rebuild begins, complete tear down.

Damage that the ESC sustained in the the crash, this is the second that has broken this way. I have now hot glued around the wired and inside the heat-shrink to add some strength. The ESC are also now in the frame and not on the arms and I have tried to remove any force been applied to the motor wires.

Completely stripped ready for the rebuild

This time all wiring is covered in plastic mesh. 

Custom wire harness to help reduce weigh and simplify the wiring.

ESC's now in the body, meshed patch leads from the motor to the SC to hopefully protect both in a crash.

I also found that I had broken the rear servo, and internal shaft had sheared. Luckily I have some that I had ordered for my simple Tcopter. They are larger ones, so hopefully stronger. I have to used the yaw from the simple Tcopter as the fortis yaw mechanism is setup for smaller servos.

All finished, much tidier and lighter than before. it will be interesting to see how the rear servo lasts.

Quadcopter flight in and around trees

My latest video. I am flying in around trees. the FC is a kk2 board and all flying is light of sight in arco flight mode. 

Gimbal Update

hi folks ...

I little quite on the blog front, been busy flying, crashing rebuilding.

Here is an update to the gimbal modifications, I posted an article on Flitetest.

http://flitetest.com/articles/playing-with-a-cheap-brushless-gimbal


I also made a Tricopter which i think is now my favorite multirotor

http://flitetest.com/articles/batbone-tricopter-various-builds

So I have been busy. I have to other articles yet to be published, Ill post links once they are up.

Gimbal Modification

After getting playing with my new gimbal for a couple of weeks I wanted to change it from a hanging type to a more horizontal facing gimbal to make it easier to mount on my different quads and reduce its overall weight.

First step was to complete pull apart the gimbal and its parts to try and figure out what was required to change its orientation.

After a bit of playing and experimentation the simplest way was to create a simple right angel out of alloy flat strip. I used the removed parts as templates for the screw holes.   the biggest part os to make sure that with everything together that it was balanced in the pitch&roll axis, otherwise it wont work.

The below image shows the completed gimbal, next I made a simple right angle to mount the gimbal to the control board mounts.

Here its mounted to the quadcopter, with the low profile I can now mount it to any of my quads. 

Here are the bits left over after the mod. 

A small video if with channel  7&8 set to alter pitch and roll.

We have gimbal

After a very long wait for it to arrive I now have a brushless gimbal.  I got this one from GoodLuckBuy. For that price it seemed unbeatable. I paid my money and it took about 4 weeks to get here. I was starting to think that it would not show up. But it did.

It was boxed pretty well.

In the time I had to wait I did a fair amount of reading and searching to make sure that I would know how to set it up. The biggest thing is to make sure its balanced and that you do have a camera or weight on it to balance in the 2axis when you turn it on.

Here it is with my mobius camera, you can see i had to move it out from center to make the gimbal balance, since it was designed for a gopro.

After I did a quick mount of the camera i powered it up and it work great. very happy with the biuld quality.

Next was to mount it the frame. I had to adjust my homemade camera mount. My mount is made from landing rails from a 600heli, fiberglass sheet that I made, rubber tubing and rubber grommets. 

I had to use taller nylon spacer to get enough ground clearance abut after that it was just a matter of zip tying to the rails.

The battery hangs out the back for counter weight to keep the CG in the middle.

I cant wait to get out and fly to see what the video quality will be like. Videos to come.

Hexacopter

So after trying a quadcopter I decided to try a hexacopter. I ordered a frame from RCTimer so I could use the same arms from the quad. That way I ended up with alot of spares.

The hex is considerably larger than the quad and heavier. Below shows the center plates beside the quadcopter.

Next I disassembled the quadcopter and started moving the parts over.

Old arms and new arms connected up to the bottom plate.

 Homemade power harness.

Wooden spacers on the bottom plate to hide the power harness and provide stable landing gear and somewhere to mount the camera.

Landing gear attached with double sided tape.

All done ready for first flights

So after a couple of flights. I found due to the weight that the flight time as short 5-6minutes on a single 2200. compared to the quad which got 8-9min. Sure there was better stability, But I wasn't getting any better video form it than the quad. So until I can afford larger motors and batteries I will stick with the quad. .... But having said that If I was able to make a light version then that would be a different story. 

I plan to purchase a gimbal soon and that may push me back to the hex for video.

A quick video using the new Mobius 1080p Camera

After a long wait the little camera showed up.  For under $100NZ this is a great alternitive to a GoPro at 6x the price.

For a detailed review of the camera go here.

Here is a quick video I did... the raw footage was clearer, but after going through iMovies and then up loading to youtude it lost some clarity. I need to figure out how to get bet upload quality.

HK330 Quadcopter slim down and lights

The little HK 330 running Turnigy SK3 1275kv motors had become my got to fun learn, practice quad. After I added some extra safety for hard landing I have not had another breakage.

But I want to slim it down and see if I could make it littler and lower profile that it currently is.

The first step to that was to try and eliminate the use of the click-clak platic box on top of the frame and relocate the KK2 board. But I still needed protection for the KK2.

After some fiddling around I found that enough room to double-sided and velcro the KK2 to the top of the Q-Brain in the middle of the frame. However I still wanted to be able to programme and change settings if required.

So I cut out the center part of the top plate, I don't think it will impact the strength a great deal, but we will find out in time and usage.

Center plate was cut with a hacksaw blade and the filed smooth.

After the KK2 board was velcroed in and the top plate screwed back on I now have a very slime low profile Quad.

Next up is the lighting, as I have to some flying in the evening clam, ie after kids in bed I got the following addition lights from hobbyking.

The police bar is very cool, you have different modes and you have blue / red on one side and yellow the other. I wired it all up and make a power harness to use one of the receiver channels to power it.

I also made this little harness to power the other additional light I will be adding. Since the receiver is only 6 channel I was running out of channels. So this has signal to got to the KK2 board for channel 5 (Arco / stabilised modes) and the positive / negative go the the 5v LED array. 

Over all the little KH330 Quad in how a much slimmer profile and lighter.




UPDATE : I re-added the heli legs minus the practice golf balls to provide protection to the battery.

BatBone V-tail Build

Well after a long wait I finally got the Batbone frame from Flitetest.com. I have not included a build post here as I posted one over on the Flitetest site.

Please follow this link to the build 

There are a couple of alterations that have been made after the first builds.

I have replaced the rear motors to be the same as the fronts, RcTimer 1000kv. I also increased the splay of the rear arms by changing out the nylon spacers with wooden ones as show below. One of the cool things on how I build the quad is the ability to change all angles easily.

I also decreased the angle of the motors from 40 degrees to 30 degrees. This better suited my flying capability and the yaw speed is more than enough.

Two Quads and a old GoPro

It has been a long while since an update. 

But there has been a lot of flying and updates. The first update is that I have abandoned making my own V-Tail. This is due to the Flitetest crew releasing their BatBone frame (Frame) and David.W making a Vtail. I love the design so will be getting one of those as the main frame for my VTail. I will use alloy tubes and the motor mounts that I have got. So look for a build blog of that once I get all the parts.

The other exciting thing is that the APM 2.5 Flight controller and GPS unit from HobbyKing arrived. Unfortunately this was right before I had to leave for 16 days on a business trip. 

My main goto quad at the moment is the 330 frame with a KK2 board, after my initial crashes and breaks I have not had break since and it flies really well. 

The only upgrade is to have the KK2 and receiver mounted inside a container, to protect from crashes. I also added some extra crash absorbers on the frame corners (Foam balls) and extra on the landing gear. Since I have done this I have not broken anything while pushing my flying envelope. 

I can fly ok 90 degrees either side of centre but still struggling with nose in. I only fly this in full acro and its great for learning and practicing on. 

I also received from a kind old friend one very old GoPro, I got this the day before I headed away, I quickly zip tied it to the 330 and took it for a flight. Some of the jello filled video is below. 

The other exciting addition is that of the APM 2.5 with GPS, I also got a case for it. I mounted this in the 450 frame for extra stability. After a few hours of getting it setup I was able to get up an flying. Here are the links I found most helpful in getting up and running.

Basic setup : http://copter.ardupilot.com/wiki/initial-setup/

Auto Tuning : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3OF9ih50PU

Getting 6 Flight modes Turnigy 9x :  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHOAMyFRGiM

There is a wealth of information out there, just start searching.

After a couple of test flights I strapped the GoPro to the 450 frame and took it for a flight to capture some video. There is alot of jello, the frame has RCtimer 1000kv motors and 10x4.5 props all of which needed proper balancing. But I was just fun to capture some footage.

It was a cold windy day so the quad was buffered around quite a bit.

Heres a little video i made of the footage