Posted by Andrew Adams on March 12, 2012 at 6:38pm
I finally got all my motors wired up and loaded the APM with the hexa firmware. I set up everything as I had done before. I plugged in the battery, armed the motors and was prepping for the maiden flight, this is where the issue begins.I slowly raised throttle only to have 4 motors spinning. At 25% throttle motor 4 kicked in (but noticeably slower than the others) and then at 50% throttle motor 1 started up. I rebooted the APM and same thing happened. I may try to reload and do the initial setup again tomorrow. I also need to verify wiring (although I checked about 4 times) because the motors don't seem to do,the expected given my stick input.Anyone else have this issue?
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Here is a video of me flying the copter while trying to give it jerky inputs...hopefully this is enough
Here is something else I noticed after flight 2...one of the motors appears to be burned and now does not rotate freely(or smoothly). Not sure what happened here. But it looks like I am going to need to replace it before I fly again.
You can see the blackend coil towards the bottom of the motor.
I reloaded my firmware and calibrated the ESCs and that has solved one problem. Turn out my ESCs are not plugged in correctly so I need to go rewire them.
I also seem to have a more serious problem...my copter doesn't have enough power/lift to achieve lift at a reasonable throttle level (70%). Is this normal? I would have expected it to lift off with much less. I am spinning 10x4.7 props on 1100kv motors. The hexa weighs in at 1.9kg.
I am looking at getting much lower kv motors and going to 12" props. Would that help?
If they all are calibrated properly (you can check by attaching ESC wires to the receiver throttle channel and check that the throttle range is the same for all of them) the other possibility is that your copter is not level - or it thinks so. Does it show horizon as level in Mission Planner? Try recalibrating autolevel and try again.
And btw the ESC calibration never worked for me on hexa, only 4 motors spun up. So maybe you missed two of them this way.
Replies
Here is a video of me flying the copter while trying to give it jerky inputs...hopefully this is enough
Here is something else I noticed after flight 2...one of the motors appears to be burned and now does not rotate freely(or smoothly). Not sure what happened here. But it looks like I am going to need to replace it before I fly again.
You can see the blackend coil towards the bottom of the motor.
I also seem to have a more serious problem...my copter doesn't have enough power/lift to achieve lift at a reasonable throttle level (70%). Is this normal? I would have expected it to lift off with much less. I am spinning 10x4.7 props on 1100kv motors. The hexa weighs in at 1.9kg.
I am looking at getting much lower kv motors and going to 12" props. Would that help?
Any help/insight would be appreciated.
If they all are calibrated properly (you can check by attaching ESC wires to the receiver throttle channel and check that the throttle range is the same for all of them) the other possibility is that your copter is not level - or it thinks so. Does it show horizon as level in Mission Planner? Try recalibrating autolevel and try again.
And btw the ESC calibration never worked for me on hexa, only 4 motors spun up. So maybe you missed two of them this way.
Have you run ESC calibration? Take a look at this: http://code.google.com/p/arducopter/wiki/AC2_ESC