ArduCopter Traditional Heli (was: "600-size heli")

I have just bought the ArduPilot Mega 2560 Full Kit... plus the Triple Axis Magnetometer HMC5883L. I should have it built over the weekend.. then i'm off to a my mates machine shop, and i'll make the splitter plate for the lower frame onto which i am going to fit the Ardupilot. the magnetometer i'll put on the tail as suggested. I am going to use my X-cell Razor 600E. For those that dont know its around the 50 size nitro heli.

Do i need to buy any other sensors i.e. the Sonar... i can fly a helicopter all day long but this is my first time flying one with stabilisation so any tips would be gratefully appreciated.

If this works well then i am going to try and use it on my x-cell gasser. i can get up to 20 minute flights with this. But i think for the time being a battery 600 is the way to go.

i'll post some pictures when i have it all together.

 

 

Setup Instructions

Tags: helicopter, instructions

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Permalink Reply by Wesley Chuen on May 2, 2012 at 9:12am

I only "arm" in for a few seconds.  I know about the 20 seconds thing to start the auto trim and didn't do that for sure.

I put the heli back in the same spot with the motor off AFTER i flew the heli for a few minutes.  It's like this:  Put the heli at a spot, re-level, fly off for a few minutes, come back and land, put the heli to the exact same spot, check level.  And the level is changed.


DeveloperPermalink Reply by Randy on May 2, 2012 at 9:02am

@Yusong,

     As Wesley says, there is an arming/disarming..you can fly without doing it but it's better if you do because of the logging and also because it reinitialises the sensors especially the barometer.  So it's not critical but it's a good thing to do.

     As for the tail issue...I've seen that in the past.  The time that I caught it in someone's logs it was caused by an intermittantly failing compass.  The compass was mostly not working but sometimes it would send in a heading and this would cause a rapid change in which way the APM thought it was facing and would lead to this rapid turn you're talking about.

     If you had working logs I would ask you to check the Mag Heading field in the ATT message but I guess that's not going to work!  you could try running the compass example sketch (open Arduino, example, AP_Compass, AP_Compass_test) and see if it's able to report good headings or not.  That will pretty much tell you if you have a hardware problem or not.

     the leaning could be caused by vibration in your frame.

Permalink Reply by Wesley Chuen on Sunday

"The compass was mostly not working but sometimes it would send in a heading and this would cause a rapid change in which way the APM thought it was facing and would lead to this rapid turn you're talking about."


That happened exactly like that to mine last week.  Apparently some of the 12 pins that connected my APM2 with the daughterboard didn't have good connections.  According to the logs, I didn't have compass ready except a blip here and there, and caused the heli to do rapid yaws at times.

Permalink Reply by Ravi on April 29, 2012 at 11:28pm

or you can use the mission planner GCS which automatically logs all flights and save in the Mission planner program log sub folder.

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