Hi All,
I have a quadframe hexa with 880kv HengLi motors with 1147 props. I'm using 30A afro escs from HK and a 3S lipo nanotech (5000mah). Apm 2.6 and a Hitec Aurora 9 with optima 9 receiver.
After a couple of minutes flight the copter basically powers down, once it's on the ground the props keep spinning but with no real power. Once I drop the thrust stick the apm disarms and I can't rearm the copter unless I disconnect the battery and reconnect - but that doesn't seem to work every time. I was wondering if it's a battery failsafe maybe? however if I charge the battery it's only lost about 1200mah.
How can I diagnose what's going on?
thanks,
Graham
Replies
I seem to have made some progress. I dropped the land voltage to 10v from the default 10.5. At 10v finish I'm using too much mah though, around 4300mah, I think if I up the land voltage to 10.1v I should finish with about 1000mah to spare which seems to be the recommended value. Once I land and check the voltage the battery is showing about 10.6-7 which makes sense since it's not under load and would recover somewhat. Here's the graph for current and voltage over the full flight of 9mins 30seconds, I don't know what the drop is since I had the copter in loiter for the full flight so there should be no drop.
I'm not sure if the 9.5 minutes flight is good or not, I've seen people with similar setups saying they're getting 12 minutes.
I've read a few posts that the most efficient prop on these size motors is the APC 12x3.8 so I've ordered some of them. I'm also going to pick up a new battery tomorrow of a different brand to see if I eke any more flight time out of it :)
Hi,
Do you have the APM power module installed? The optional extra that allows you to monitor battery voltage and current? I don't have one myself, but from the wiki you need to tell this what capacity your batteries are - maybe this is wrong? (see http://copter.ardupilot.com/wiki/common-measuring-battery-voltage-a...)
Also if you have this then you should be able to enable voltage and current logging and then look at the dataflash logs to see if this is why your copter is landing (see http://copter.ardupilot.com/wiki/downloading-and-analyzing-data-log...)
If you have some logs from your flights it would be worth trying to analyse those, or post them in the hope that someone else will look at them.
Cheers,
Rob.