Jason Pittman (Geosciences Professor and co-conspirator) and I had the chance to fly the quad over the wetlands today, and had a couple of really good flights. The image above is one of the better ones – note the game trails and vegetation patterns. The next step will be to georeference this and other photos, using known reference points – roads, property lines, that little drain (below, lower left).
Minor crash yesterday into the wetlands. Only broke one landing gear, so a quick fix and back into the air. Set the GoPro on the one-photo-every-two-seconds mode – this is maybe the best of the bunch:
A little windy today, so I decided not to press my luck, and landed without incident.
When the GoPro Hero 2 cameras arrived, this little plastic mounting plate was glued to the top of the each box, presumably for display purposes?
In any case, the plate makes a really solid camera mount, albeit a shaky one. In an effort to dampen some of the vibration and steady the camera, I cut up a piece of an old Gateway mousepad and attached it between the body of the quadcopter and the re-mounted the plate.
Here’s the finished product, with the GoPro waterproof housing attached. Future flight videos and still images will hopefully be a little more stable now.
After the bad crash – the bitter outcome of this otherwise successful flight – I rebuilt the ELEV-8, and finally had the chance to fly it this afternoon. One of the props is acting a little janky, so I need to check that the ESCs are all programmed correctly, and determine whether or not that particular motor has a bent shaft, but am otherwise happy with the outcome.
One of the crucial tasks in getting the quadcopter flying is programming the ESCs, or Electronic Speed Controllers. They store a variety of parameters, not all of which I entirely understand, but all of which need to be set for each ESC. The Turnigy Programming Card pictured above makes this process easy. Simply connect the ESC to the card, load the settings, and repeat. I created this little job aid as a quick reference for the appropriate settings.
Got a bunch of flight time in today, and I’m starting to just barely get the hang of it. Things were going well until the quad went over my head, and I got disoriented and flew it into a tree. Broke a prop, but am slowly learning how it responds in the air. Last week, I took it over to Parallax, and Nick flew it in the parking lot and gave me some pointers. Nick and Jim and Kevin have been nothing but supportive!
Burning through landing gear at a mean rate, so I decided to build up some little cushions…
Taking Nick’s advice, I mostly just hopped around the field, but I had something of a yaw problem, and then ended up crashing in order to try and prevent a crash. Go figure. Broke 2 props and 2 landing gear bits, but I learned something. 39 more hours of practice, and I should be able to fly this thing!
Can you guess what the problem was? I feel a bit foolish, but realized after much fussing and tweaking of settings that the kit contains two kinds of props: clockwise ones, and counterclockwise ones. I had three out of four correct, merely by accident, but once I replaced the errant one, I took the quad out into the night for just a basic spin up. Result: the roll problem is, of course, gone. Foolish though the mistake may have been, I’m reporting it here in the hope that someone might stumble upon it and learn from my errors. Tomorrow, we fly!
See that 26% setting? I think that’s what’s going to make this work. Taking a step back, I’ve been struggling all day with takeoff, one a surprise, the other a genuine break-the-prop failure. The craft seems to want to roll to the left when I hit the throttle.
After breaking two props, I suspended the ELEV-8 from a tree with a bit of twine, and was able to confirm that in fact, at full throttle, it would just flip itself over. I believe the problem has to do with setting a particular value in the Gear setting, and even though I read a bunch of forum postings and also the DX8 manual, I only now understand (I think) what needs to be done. Tomorrow, I hope to have a successful takeoff!