The X550 has returned!

Today I found the phone with the number set up for people whom might have found my quad with a new message :). A local farmer had found it in the woods to the west of the high way where I was flying eastwards of. In other words, it flew over 300 meters away from where I have been looking for it.

 

I still haven't had the time to assess any damages but from what I can see, the frame is slightly bent in a couple of places and propellers are broken. Other than that will be in my next post.  

Maiden flight flipped over

Today I flew my quad for the first time. It left the ground and within less then one second flipped over..

It seems as if one of my motors isn't running correctly. Each electric motor, as most people know, consists of a number of magnets that are energised in sequence in order to turn the propeller. However, if one or more of these magnets are faulty, the propeller will not turn as intended. This is something that the motor early on indicated as the propeller seemed as if it didn't start up as early as with the other motors. I choose to ignore that and drove up the throttle, which then made the propeller turn and accelerate as the others. This then made the quad to flip over each time I tried to fly.

As this blog states, I tried to keep my budget low and to buy cheap parts. The motors I'm using are branded Turnigy. That brand is a cheap Chinese pirated copy of another brand, which also makes it less reliable. I was then also early on recommended to buy a few extra motors while ordering to be able to coupe with one of them to be broken on delivery. That I never did. So, today, I've ordered two extra motors plus two ESC's as I actually don't know if they may be faulty as well.

Another thing, I tried to mount the prop savers to the engines today to be able to save the propellers if I'd crash only to figure out that I'd ordered prop savers with the wrong dimension of the propeller shaft. Ordered 4mm prop savers now also instead of the old 3mm.

No success without a little ooops!

Progress! I've got both radio modules talking to each other after flashing with the openLRSng firmware. I actually didn't do any changes to the default settings and it compiled without any issues. The upload of the firmware however was a bit complicated.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I bought a USB serial converter called CP2102. What I probably should have bought was a FTDI adapter. This adapter has a pin called DST, which is needed to auto reset the target board when the new firmware has been transferred. The CP2102 however does not provide easy access to the DST pin. The solution was, as many others have done is to do a make shift soldering on the USB adapter in order to provide access to the DST.


And, first off, I cannot take credits for this tiny soldering. It's been done by a another guy who is far better than me. The solution consists basically of connecting pin 28 from the chip in the middle to output on the RST pin. A resistor was also removed to break the RST connection to not get double signals. I actually removed the resistor and made the other soldering, which probably was way easier. Soldering the wire to the 28th pin of the chip had to be done under a microscope :).



So, now we've got a working radio link that I've verified to provide signals that work as intended. The picture below shows how I've connected the radio receiver to the power distribution board, which also connects to one of the ESC's that connects to one of the motors. I'm now in the process of programming and calibrating the ESC's. This is needed to ensure that all motors behave in the same way and provide the correct amount of power given the throttle.

Todays ooops! happened when I by accident short circuited the battery and left some ugly marks. I should have put shrink tube on the soldered connectors of the power distribution board before playing with it, but I didn't :[.

Lost or stolen package content?

So I received another package in the mail today. This was all about the radio. Now it was pretty obvious right away that something had happened to the package. Someone have obviously broken into the Turnigy radio transmitter package. It's been ripped open and somewhat closed up and most of it's content is missing as you can see here on the picture.

The other things I was all intact and according to the package manifest. From left to right; back lights for the non-lit LCD display on the transmitter, OrangeRX radio receiver for the quad side and radio transmitter module to fit on the Turnigy radio transmitter.

I've just filed a complain to Hobby King's customer service and I guess we'll take it from there. This is a bad setback that I didn't expect and I hope that it can be solved. The transmitter was not that pricy but still $49.

The Ladybird flies again

After some vital reconstruction and replacement parts, my ladybird flies once more. It's body was completely shattered and had to be replaced. That was done using the spare body I bought a couple of weeks ago again from Banggood.

Did you however notice how I mounted the new body sideways? The battery should face vertically, not horizontally as on the picture. But it doesn't seem to mater :).

That's the way the cookie crumbles

So I need to fix my first quad. This is what happens when flying into hard walls.