Hello everyone, A friend of mine was flying his Naza powered hexacopter on a film shoot today when he lost a motor. The hexacopter started rotating rapidly (as it is suppose to) and with Naza's coding he was able to fly it home and land it safely.
This got me thinking...
In flying around a few thousand dollars worth of equipment I have a concern that if the APM does not have any compensation built in I may have to join the dark side and purchase a Naza.
The Naza M V2 advertises: "Motor Failure Protection: If a hexrotor or octorotor equipped with a Naza-M V2 suffers a motor failure in flight in attitude or GPS mode, it will maintain its altitude and rotate around the stopped motor. This allows it to fly safely back to home and land." I saw the value in this today which saved my friends hexacopter, and all the camera equipment onboard, from coming to a nasty end.
Can an APM powered hexacopter fly with a motor out? Does the APM coding have and sort of motor compensation/failsafe in it?
The other option would be to install a parachute. Would anyone have a link to one that doesn't cost and arm and a leg? Or even better, links to a DIY / home made parachute design?
Cheers, Cameron
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Replies
Short answer is yes it can fly with one prop or motor out on Y6, X8, Hex, Octa configs.
AFAIK its not a coding issue, but mainly of the amount of control the multirotor has with the failure.
Y6 with single broken prop flies no problem with less yaw authority with APM, however you remove two of the same coaxial set and you'll have a big brick in your hands.
As for parachutes there are some pretty affordable ones from Mars Parachutes, imo they are affordable because they are top notch quality and building something as reliable isn't as easy as you'd think.
I fly my Y6 with a Mars parachute without issue - there is even some code in Arducopter to allow you to auto deploy parachute on failure, however this is not yet available for all flight controllers that use arducopter just yet.
There are ways to enable it on older boards, however I would simply prefer manual deployment to avoid any problems.
As for DIY for Parachutes there are plenty of guys who have built some DIY ones that work amazingly, search the forums, however you always have to remember that when people build DIY stuff, the amount of effort that goes into material qualities (parachute material, rip cord material) is what will determine if your chute will save your Hex/Octa or even Quad and this is why I bought a built deployment mechanism.