Current and voltage meter in the mail today!

 

This is what I got in the mail today. I ordered it from GoodLuckBuy and it was shipped out 10 days ago. This still means that the average time to delivery from China is about 9-10 days depending on holidays I suppose.

The little device in the middle gets hooked up and man-in-the-middles the power coming from the battery and tells the flight controller how much juice it has left. There is an excellent integration instruction at ArduCopters wiki but this is roughly how its meant to work shown in the picture to the right. There are some settings in Mission Planner that allows the flight controller to conduct an emergency landing if the voltage falls too low. Remember that I previously written that I've set my ESC's to cut power at 3V in order to spare the batterys health. This means that I should make an emergency landing prior to that. Other than an emergency landing is also to order the flight controller to RTL. However, we all know how that ended last time..

Talking about failing RTL's, I yesterday think I've got a clue why the GPS has been acting strange lately. By accident, I looked at the quad's heading according to the flight controller and it was 90 degrees wrong. This means that I've mounted the GPS 90 degrees wrong which makes the flight controller do things the wrong way.

Another update is that I received an e-mail this morning from the author of MegaPirateNG with a link to MPNG-3.0.1-R2 :). I still haven't downloaded the code but I sure will within the next few days.

I've also got another package in the mail about a week ago, which I still haven't written about. I will do so in a separate blog post due to its large content. I also have a few surprise upgrades so stay tuned ;)

 

Radio telemetry ordered

A few days ago, I decided that it was time to order a radio telemetry set. I went for the set from GoodLuckBuy.com (got to love that name) for roughly $36. However, today when I investigated into why I hadn't received any package tracking information, I discovered that the package hadn't event been shipped out. Slightly disappointing as the page does not clam that the items are out of stock. The support chat however informed me that the items were in fact out of stock. Big minus for that site.

Anyhow. Not loosing fate, I decided to order yet another item, which I found in the new arrivals at DealExtreme as well but for a higher price. This is a current and voltage sensor that is way cheaper than shiny once at Sparkfun.com. It looks the same and has the same specifications but for a lower price, $14. It's used to report how much juice is left in the battery back to the MultiWii flight controller, which may take action if the capacity is going low. Actions such as RTL or land. We'll see how this goes but the support attendee informed me that the item was in fact in stock. At least one item was..

One motor down..

Yesterday, I started trimming the AltHold function that relies on any altitude sensors. The sensor I have so far been using is the barometer, which is very noisy. That means it's less then perfect at holding it's altitude, but works +/- 1-2 meters.

Today, I thought of doing some more testing, maybe even try the AutoLand function as the AltHold seemed to work. However, after a few minutes of flying this happened..

 

One of the motors came off upon takeoff and took a piece of the radio antenna with it. The motors are fastened with two screws at the bottom and it seems as it came unscrewed, possibly due to vibrations. This seem to be the case for one other of the motors when I checked them all. It seems as checking the screws before going flying is a bullet on the pre-flight checklist.

Now, I only found one of the screws, which means, I have to get another somehow. Not sure if I should order a whole new frame as spare part or if I should try to find one in a local utility store. I'm going to try the second option tomorrow to see if they have any thing available that would work as a substitute.

Yes, there will be more videos. I have two that I filmed yesterday when doing some trimming but I haven't uploaded them to YouTube yet as my bandwidth is limited and the amount is not unlimited at the moment.