Copters tip over. (In other news, sky is blue, water is wet.)
Within days of its maiden flight, my colleague's Y6 broke the 3-inch carbon-tube mast supporting the GPS antenna and compass. Ditto for my X8, though I luckily fractured only the clamp at the base, so it can still fly gently.
Has anyone tried to make a deliberately breakaway mast? It should ignore vibration, air loads and bouncy landings. It should snap off cleanly when given a large sideways or downward force, so it can be remounted in a minute or two at little or no cost.
This is the principle behind the nylon bolts (or half dozen rubber bands) that hold the wing onto a conventional r/c airplane, and behind countless other mechanical systems.
Brittle-ified zip ties? Blob of Goop? Hot-melt glue plus something else?
Step the mast on a Velcro or Lego base, and stay it with rubber-band standing rigging?
( Pics of original mast: http://store.3drobotics.com/products/3dr-rtf-x8-2014 )
Replies
After my first mast breakage, I bought 3 more 3DR masts and have never had to use them. :-)
Tim
Solved. I unbolted the 4x4 cm mast base from the copter. Then I slid the mast into a 4x4x10 cm block of EPS, gooped moderately on the bottom and sparely on the top. So now the antenna sits on a pillar of foam.
A friend suggested replacing the mast with a 2 cm EPS foam block, because most of the compass's interference comes from the motors, not the small amount of ferrous metal in the copter's core. However, others on this forum report interference from motor wiring and ESCs (my copter has 8), even though that's high-frequency AC. This is corroborated by the ArduPilot wiki.
Because even nondismasted X8's have reported random yaw, it seems unwise for me to shorten the mast.