It became self aware

Someone once said: -"Pictures or it didn't happen".

This is how to get prepared for flight. In addition to the quad and the transmitter, you need a laptop.

Everything is by this time wired. That's why you see the green light on the flight controller. It indicates that the GPS reports that it is locked on to a fixed position. The sonar is also connected and reports correctly.

 

Another picture..

So, you wanna see how it flies :) ? The video is rather short due to two factors.

• The battery of my mobile was at this time drained to 4%, hence keeping it short.
• The left down motor gets seriously overheated due to some fault. It may break down if its magnets gets loose. This could happen due to heat as they are glued on...

 Note that I show no hands as the quad loiters :)

It has taken to the skies

 

[spot the shadow from the quad down to the right]

 

After painstakingly tuning P, I and D parameters in Mission Planner, it can now fly. This is a configuration part that I wasn't aware of until a few days ago, when I didn't understand why it was way too wobbly and always crashed. The reason was that my PID parameters was offside given the model, motor and propeller size I have. After some tuning using this guide, I was able to get it stable. There is still far to go when it comes to more autonomous flight but.. it flies!

Link to PID tuning guide.

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.