Hello guys,
I am brand new to this forum and it looks awesome and I hope to become a part of the community here. I have been flying RC for a long time and more recently I've gotten into flying full size airplanes but I have always been really interested in FPV rc flying as well as fully automated drones.
Anyway my real question is: how do I get started with this? It seems pretty tempting to go all in and buy a brand new RTF ArduCopter, but seeing as I have a bit of programming knowledge, an arduino, a soldering iron and a pretty sweet Trex e600 in the garage I think it may be a better call to build a drone from what I have but, I could be wrong. I also have a nitro .30 size Raptor and a variety of spare parts around. I'm really hoping the majority of the equipment will still be useful as a drone (ie esc, gyro, tx/rx)
If anyone has a build history of how they went about this or a similar conversion I would love to hear about it!
Thanks in advance!
-Ford
Replies
Ford
I'm in the same boat as you. I have a T-rex 550e and also a Bergen gasser ( 26cc gasoline engine ). I'm thinking of working with the smaller T-rex first, but I'd love to get the gasser going too eventually. I just bought the arduino board from SparkFun and will be working on it shortly.
mark
Wow David the pics and parameters will definitely help! I am still in the shopping/planning phase so it's definitely a little early for me to be looking at all of this. Very cool though, I'll have to revisit all of this after I get a little further along.
Ford
Robert,
Thats good to hear. The only variable that has changed for me is the latest version of MP. I am glad it is not only me.
Regards.
David Boulanger
basically tuning is not too difficult, but it must be done after carefully checking all the connections and basic settings like the movement of the servo's must be in the right direction, the rotation of the motors of a quad must be correct, etc. This must be done before tuning.
A very simple example is to take out all the props of a quad, and start to "fly", hold it in the hand, and try to turn it using your hand in different directions and observe the correction that is made by the controller (whether the increasing/decreasing of the rpm of each motor correspond to the correction etc.) Same for heli but to observe whether the swashplate is moving to the correct direction, also the tail. Then check whether the swashplate/tail correspond to your tx.
Once all basic setting are done correctly, you're very likely not gonna crash your copter in the tuning stage. Always starts with a low gain, in this case the controller won't over control and you'll still have control to your UAV.
Last: traning gear on and stay 5 meter away, 10 meter for a 500+ heli :D
Thanks for the info! I will definitely look into all of those things. I guess it does make sense to buy one to tinker with first if crashing is just part of the deal, although I'd like to think I won't crash I know there's no guarantees. I love helis but would a quadrotor or airplane be a better uav platform?
Welcome Ford,
It's great that you have nice heli's. As long as you already have a heli/TX, all you need is a controller, telemetry and GPS to make it a full automated beauty. You don't need the gyro/fbl unit anymore, but you do need the rest of your heli. FPV equipments will be great if you have them, coz you don't want to fly "blind" if your heli is 1 mile away.
I heard that vibration of nitro heli's are quite a problem to the autopilot, so it may be better to start with battery.
The ardupilot website has much info to begin: http://copter.ardupilot.com/, and some extra info for heli's in this wiki: https://code.google.com/p/arducopter/wiki/TradHeli_Configuration