Moderator Comment by Gary Mortimer on March 3, 2012 at 2:47am

Points may be deducted for people that wear cameras on their hats though. That's just silly.

Comment by Colin on March 3, 2012 at 10:11am

Hi all,

I’ve now flown my entry for this round. I did the course two times in a row to test the consistency and prove that the landings weren’t too hard ;-)

The flight times were almost identical at 61 and 62 seconds each. The landing spots from the logs were measured to be 7 metres apart in google earth. The KML for the flight can be found here

Here’s a YouTube video of the two flights

If you look carefully, you can see my arm go out away from the transmitter (which I had to hold to flick into auto mode) after launching. Also, I held the transmitter up during the landing to show that I wasn’t flying it.

The pitch up just before landing is where I scheduled a speed reduction. The weight of the on-board camera caused the canopy to pop off on landing, a bit of tape would have helped...

Here’s a top down view of the flight paths. The red line is the first flight and is the log I am submitting for the competition. The biggest deviation seems to be from my launch direction :)

The big jaggies in the red must be data errors because the flight itself was smooth. The green flight actually lost GPS fix twice, once straight after launch and once about 20 seconds in, for half a second.

Here’s a couple of 3D views

and the measurement between the two landing spots

I measured my climb rate response using the FBW-B mode. There’s a bit of a lag in the step response, which I thought could be an issue on such a tight course, but the results came out pretty well I thought :)

My airframe is a Multiplex Twinstar II. I’ve modified it with brushless outrunners, the details can be found on my blog. The autopilot is an A

Comment by Colin on March 3, 2012 at 10:13am

My post was too long, here's the rest of it:

My airframe is a Multiplex Twinstar II. I’ve modified it with brushless outrunners, the details can be found on my blog. The autopilot is an APM 1 with mediatek GPS (sadly I broke my ublox trying to get a tricopter into the competition). I also have a 5883L mag, but being the first outing with both it and the mediatek, I’m not sure how much difference it made.

I was running the APM 2.8 code, but removed the two lines that scale the navigation roll term with ground speed.

I’d like to thank all the dev team for sharing their hard work; Chris and Gary for these competitions, please keep them going, I’m learning a lot from taking part. Also, thanks to my club-mate Paul for helping film this round.

And finally, a gentle reminder of the peril at my flying field: here’s where my plane “landed” once back in the pre-beta days

Moderator Comment by Gary Mortimer on March 3, 2012 at 10:49am

Ohhhhh a Twinstar, plus 5 points I have a soft spot for them, also a tight looking launchsite. Well done.

Well done Colin

So the only real UAS drivers around here drive aircraft ;-)

Just noticed your from Bristol, I was born there and parents are still in South Somerset, so you might be building a lead. All those positive points might be deducted if Lulsgate noticed. I have a story about a manned flight exactly where you are flying, but thats for the pub not here!

Comment by Colin on March 3, 2012 at 11:00am

Thanks Gary :)

I tried driving a tricopter, but it wobbled too much, and then it broke my nice ublox. Maybe I'll forgive it and try to enter it next round...

Comment by Philip Giacalone on March 3, 2012 at 5:14pm

Congrats, Pete!!! That was a sweet flight over a beautiful area. A nice close up of some very pretty trees. And a great nice landing only ten meters from the launch spot -- nice! And thanks for the little plug in the video's credits. That was a surprise! Next stop..., hollywood!

@Gary I'll take any extra points you wanna hand out! Check lists, nose dragging, wheels... Whatever... :-)

@Ric I'm really looking forward to seeing your upside down entry :-)

Developer Comment by Pete Hollands on March 4, 2012 at 2:05am

Hi Colin, lovely entry. Congratulations.

Comment by Colin on March 4, 2012 at 4:52am

Hi Pete, thanks :) 

Your flight was very good, nice and smooth. Do you have any landing options for flaring or the like? Or do you extend your finals to give you a nice shallow glide slope for landing? This seems to be the best way with the APM at the moment, but at the expense of needing more room.

Am I right in thinking that the logo flight plan starts from where you throw it?

Also, on your flight analysis, the magnetic vectors, are they showing local declination, or do they show some estimation process? I didn't realise it varies quite so much!

Looking forward to our next meetup

Regards,

Colin

Comment by Philip Giacalone on March 4, 2012 at 5:53pm

Very nice entry, Colin. I like the telemetry plots, too.

Comment by Phil Cole on March 5, 2012 at 12:52am

Here's something I threw together at the last minute. It was such a nice day it seems almost criminal not to go flying.

KML File

Log file

The picture shows two flight modes used: FBW-A while I walked to the launch point, and Auto from then on. As can be seen, I didn't spend anytime tuning - there had been many too many EEPROM format changes since last time I tuned it, and there was a bit of a breeze. Believe it or not, it did sort of go near the waypoints.

This is where it was meant to go:

Airframe: Parkzone Radian

Autopilot: APM1, UBlox GPS, XBee 900 MHz telemetry, No magnetometer

SW: http://code.google.com/r/tridge60-apm-wip/source/list  DCM-wip version fcebf

I tried enabling the quaternion implementation, but it didn't work so well in auto mode. This may be due to my lack of a compass - replaying the log showed the plane flying in random orientations (backwards, sideways, etc.)

There is also a very boring video of me standing around watching it fly. Sorry I didn't keep the transmitter in view all the time, but I did't touch the sticks. I replayed the log while watching the radio input - the only change was the selection of Auto mode on Ch 8. The route after takeoff was "interesting", but it did sort it out.

http://youtu.be/q-sXwElDXVA

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