After several weeks I finally got my new all-aluminum frame 605mm quad-rotor flying. Ran it thru it's basic flight tests and PID tuning. And ran an endurance flight test with mixed flight modes, and not just in hover. I got 31 minutes 14 seconds from takeoff to auto-land due to low battery.
The aircraft has a takeoff weight with no payload of 2420 grams. I selected a Turnigy 10A 10C flight battery. The flight controller is a APM2.8 clone board with a Neo 6M+ GPS with external compass. The ESC's are Lumenier 32-bit ARM processor "Silk" 30A, the motors are Turnigy 3508-640's swinging 1355 CF T-props. It was supposed to have 1455 props, but they never got here yet, so the initial flight testing was done with the 1355's.
After I got done with the initial tuning and trimming, it flies beautifully and will hit 50mph in Stabilize or Alt Hold mode. It does 44 mph in Loiter mode.
Vertical lifting test, was able to lift it's own weight (5000 grams takeoff weight) out of ground effect and still maneuver with the load. Flight time wasn't tested at 5kg, but it required ~75% throttle to get out of ground effect with each motor pulling 24 amps, which is about the limit of what the battery can produce. It has a thrust/weight ratio of about 2.8:1 for 15 seconds at 100% throttle with the motors pulling almost 30 amps each. Current in hover was 17 amps total.
Overall, pretty happy with how it turned out.
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