I know it has been a while, but everything flies as planned. With the 3600Ma batter I get about 10 minutes of flight time and the thing is screaming fast. I'm still using the very conservative setup for endpoints for the Turnigy 9x setup, which will prevent you from doing any real acrobatics, but nonetheless it flies!
On another point I bought a small Hubsan MicroQuad, which flies JUST LIKE THE REAL THING! It is a great trainer tool for flying a quad that is set up on the KK2 board.
Friday, July 5, 2013
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Test Flight Take #2
I went out this morning to give it a test. I found a nice soft grassy area and set about giving it a test. Immediately upon takeoff the quad would start spinning to the right, slightly at first and then faster and faster. I knew what this meant thanks to doing some quality web browsing - a reversed yaw gyro.
The procedure for fixing this is to set the roll pot to zero, turn on the transmitter, power up the control board, then move the yaw stick. It should then start flashing continuously at a very high rate until you turn the power off. This should fix the problem. (Make sure to put the pot back in the middle)
One easy way to test is to hold the quad over your head with props on - be very careful - and then try to rotate it clockwise or counterclockwise. The quad should really try to fight you. If it feels like there is just a little resistance than try to increase the gain on the yaw pot a little. This thing should honestly feel like it doesn't want you to rotate it! If it's not resisting you'll need to reverse that pot.
To Infinity and Beyond!!!
Not really - after I got the yaw problem fixed I did a few test bounces, then played with the hovering a bit. I was able to get it to hover a few feet off the ground and move it around a bit, but I can still tell something isn't quite right. What I experienced was the following: I could get it off the ground and it wanted to go slightly forward, and I could compensate, but then when I tried to steer it took too long for it to stop steering. That is, when I told it to go right, it would go for quite a ways before it would stop going right. I know it should be crisper on the controls, but I'm not sure what the cause of this is. I'll do a little message board searching and see if I can figure out what is going on.
Getting close to first "real" flight, but not there quite yet.
The procedure for fixing this is to set the roll pot to zero, turn on the transmitter, power up the control board, then move the yaw stick. It should then start flashing continuously at a very high rate until you turn the power off. This should fix the problem. (Make sure to put the pot back in the middle)
One easy way to test is to hold the quad over your head with props on - be very careful - and then try to rotate it clockwise or counterclockwise. The quad should really try to fight you. If it feels like there is just a little resistance than try to increase the gain on the yaw pot a little. This thing should honestly feel like it doesn't want you to rotate it! If it's not resisting you'll need to reverse that pot.
To Infinity and Beyond!!!
Not really - after I got the yaw problem fixed I did a few test bounces, then played with the hovering a bit. I was able to get it to hover a few feet off the ground and move it around a bit, but I can still tell something isn't quite right. What I experienced was the following: I could get it off the ground and it wanted to go slightly forward, and I could compensate, but then when I tried to steer it took too long for it to stop steering. That is, when I told it to go right, it would go for quite a ways before it would stop going right. I know it should be crisper on the controls, but I'm not sure what the cause of this is. I'll do a little message board searching and see if I can figure out what is going on.
Getting close to first "real" flight, but not there quite yet.
Friday, March 8, 2013
Ecalc Tool
One handy little tool that I found online is at the eCalc Multirotor Calculator, which will tell you what your setup will do. It has tons of great defaults and can tell you if you are going to get off the ground and how long your battery will likely last. Below is a screenshot of my calculations:
New Frame and Rebuild
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| Side view of new quadcopter frame. |
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| Top view of new quadcopter frame |
The frame is a perfect fit for the motors and for the control board, which is incredibly helpful and can be set up both the + and X configurations - for now I'm going with the + configuration. The reason I'm doing that is that + is the default and I've had some trouble programming the control board - and this is after I burnt one up - oops!
I did a couple of test bounces and it handled okay, but I can tell that it needs some fine tuning and I'm not sure if that should be done on the control side or on the gyro side.
I think tomorrow I will head out to a grassy field and see how it handles, try to do some test hovers, and see if I can actually fly it around for a few seconds. I'll post an update once I get some flight data.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Frame Finished
I needed to add a battery holder and something to protect the electronics in case of an upside down landing, so I decided to do both at once. It was relatively easy to do. Below are the pics.
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| Top View |
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| Side View |
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| Back View |
ESC Not a Problem - HK Control Board
Earlier I had written that I thought that the Turnigy Trust ESCs were a problem because they couldn't be manually throttle calibrated. Turns out that I was wrong. It was actually the HobbyKing control board that was causing my headache.
Here is the info that could save you that headache too!
HobbyKing Control Board v3.0 Atmel 328PA:
Unfortunately as is the case with many HK products they have absolute crap for support and rely on other users to do it for them, and often have outdated or just wrong user manuals. In this case, it was the latter. You see, HK rips off designs that others come up with and have their Chinese supplier build them for 1/10th the price, and then sells them on the cheap - and price matters with this stuff, so that is why I shop there. Anyhow, that isn't the point.
The point is that they had a user manual for this item that tells you to put everything as Atmel 48PA, which is what the KK board version uses, but the Atmel 328PA is distinctly different in that it has a different memory size! And unfortunately, the chip itself doesn't know what is up, so it will just do what you tell it to do. What you really need to do is:
Here is the info that could save you that headache too!
HobbyKing Control Board v3.0 Atmel 328PA:
Unfortunately as is the case with many HK products they have absolute crap for support and rely on other users to do it for them, and often have outdated or just wrong user manuals. In this case, it was the latter. You see, HK rips off designs that others come up with and have their Chinese supplier build them for 1/10th the price, and then sells them on the cheap - and price matters with this stuff, so that is why I shop there. Anyhow, that isn't the point.
The point is that they had a user manual for this item that tells you to put everything as Atmel 48PA, which is what the KK board version uses, but the Atmel 328PA is distinctly different in that it has a different memory size! And unfortunately, the chip itself doesn't know what is up, so it will just do what you tell it to do. What you really need to do is:
- Use the new Atmel Studio 6.0 software
- Plug your HK Control Board into the USB programmer and plug the battery into the control board!
- Open up the dialogue for programming in Atmel Studio
- Tell the software that it is the Atmel 328PA and click Apply
- Click Read and then see what it says. It should tell you that it is the Atmel 328PA chip.
- Go to the Fuses tab and set "SPIEN" as checked; BODLEVEL = 1v8; SUT_CKSEL = 8Mhz 6CK/14CK +65ms (Default)
- Go to memories, select the .hex file you want to load, and then click on program.
That fixed my problems of the motors not being synced up. Now it appears to be working just fine.
FPV System: Now Working!
Thanks to the folks at ReadyMadeRC I now have a functioning FPV system! The problem was a bad battery - and since it was the only battery I had that had a JST connector I couldn't test it with another one... I was probably a little shortsighted in buying just one, and will correct that now that I know it is working.
Anyway, I'm glad I bought my camera system from them because they were very responsive to my questions and I couldn't imagine HobbyKing being nearly as cooperative as they were.
Anyway, I'm glad I bought my camera system from them because they were very responsive to my questions and I couldn't imagine HobbyKing being nearly as cooperative as they were.
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