More Flights = More Learning Opportunities

Went back to PA for the weekend and got to fly a couple times. I tried flying at my house because some people wanted to see me fly. Against my better judgement I said yes. Besides being a small area, there are a bunch of trees... So as you can imagine it almost ended in disaster. Thankfully the drone gods smiled on me and I somehow flew through a bunch of branches and landed safely. After that I went to my old elementary school, which is now vacant, and got some great flights in.

I am still noticing a wobble when flying, and it is starting to become a problem. So I started adjusting some settings. I first turned down the roll and pitch full through limit to 45 degrees so the sticks wouldn't be so sensitive. Next I adjusted my PID settings. I turned my attitude Kp value down, and set the Ki setting to slightly below it (set rate Ki and Kd to zero). Unfortunately it was really windy tonight when I tried out the new setting and was getting dark so I crashed and it broke my bottom plate, guess I will have to print that part with a higher infill. I'll have to try to tune this when there is no wind. I also noticed that the rear left motor seems to not spin when all the other motors start spinning. This is a problem since the quad wants to flip when it takes off until the motor spins up to the other motors speed.

So basically I've got some adjustments to make. Sounds like my next flight is going to be a lot of short take offs followed by landings for adjustments.

Second Flight

Decided to go for a flight on Wednesday after work. Went to a local field (Browning Fields). The weather was great, pretty much zero wind, warm, and sunny. I had two of my props on backwards, oops. I forgot to move the props around with the motors after I changed their mounting orientation. After that quick fix I did a short line of sight flight to make sure nothing else was wrong, with that test passing I set up my FPV gear and started my first flight of the afternoon.

Up until this point I had pretty much only flown FPV in a simulator for about 3 hours, so I had a little experience. My last flight was all line of sight and involved a lot of crashes (the field was also really tiny). So I was a little nervous jumping right into using my FPV goggles, but I am really glad I did. Flying in FPV was soooo much easier than line of sight. All the controls were as you expected (ie you don't have to reverse your controller movements when the quad is flying at you). I had two short 3 minute flights followed by two longer 6 minute flights. On each flight I felt very in control and had zero crashes. Overall a great day.

Some things I noticed were that the yaw control was very very sensitive, and the PID control loop on my flight control was in need of some tuning. Every once in a awhile the quad would start shaking back and forth for a few seconds making it very hard to control. So I think before my next flight I will try to tune the controller a little bit.

Here is a video from one of my flights.

Let the Modifications Begin!

After the first flight I had some modifications I wanted to make in order to improve the quad.

Added a JST connector and soldered on a new XT60 cable since the old one was cut by the prop

Motors in the correct positions now

New cable management plan

Moved video TX forward by drilling a new hole

Battery connector out the back protects the cable from prop strikes

Completed Modifications

Added a 10mm white LED in the front and a 3mm red led in the back

ESC wires are now coming out the bottom of the quad and then up onto the arms

JST connector for 8V to top plate electronics

Receiver moved up front