1st Quad Race

Took my lunch break with two of my coworkers yesterday and went over to the field near our work. My coworker Jim had just finished his custom designed quad and was trying it for the first time. Murphies law obviously made an appearance and it took us some time to debug the couple issues that were present. After that his quad had a short flight and then took a hard landing completely breaking the frame. He'll 3D print a new one and be ready to go in no time though.

My other coworker Matt and I decided to have a race on our second battery pack. We did a 3 lap race up and down the field. I had a ton of fun and was surprised how well I was able to keep it low to the ground. I should mention that I decided to change the PI gains around a bit for the second flight and that really helped. I had set them back to default for the first flight and had the same problems with wobble that I had been having. I turned the gains down a bit and wow did it make a difference. Obviously I didn't tune them, but just that little change really helped. I will have to take some time and tune them properly soon. The new PID gains are as follows.

The battery on the bottom of the quad worked out fine and seemed to have no effect on the flight characteristics. Looking forward to another race on Thursday.

Battery Woes

I have not had great luck with batteries recently. My troubles started when I took a hard landing and my rear arm broke resulting in a prop strike to my battery pack, see below.

Next problem I encountered was when I was doing my preflight and discovered that the battery in my transmitter was dead. Apparently the transmitter was switched on in the case and this drained the battery all the way to zero causing it to puff up, see below. At this point both batteries are toast. I had thought that the transmitter had a safety feature that would cut power if the battery got too low, but I guess not.

In order to prevent this in the future I am going to do two things. One, I will relocate the quad battery to the bottom of the quad. Two, I will always unplug the transmitter battery after flying. Looks like I need to write pre-flight and post-flight checklists...