Moderator

Pre-flight testing and flight testing

During pre-flight testing I discovered the the rear motor wasn't functioning correctly.

The rear motor would power up with the other motors, but when forward cyclic command was sent, the rear motor should increase but it didn't. On disarming the motors, the rear motor on 3 occasions powered up with disconnecting the battery or another disarm command

Testing of the ESC and motor by connecting them another output channel cleared them of problems.

Even directly connecting the ESC to the APM output # 4 thus bypassing the power distro board did not fix the problem.

So I found a short term fix, connect the rear motor ESC directly to APM output #5 and reconfigure Motors.pde to have rear motor on channel 4 (output #5).

Something a little strange is on power up the rear motor ESC sounds continuous beeps indicating a throttle problem for about 3 seconds then stops beeping. And then everything appears to function 100%.

 

Having sorted out the rear motor problem I started flight testing today.

Flight 1 was on Aerobatic mode. Powered up, got the quad "light on the skids" and started hovering upto a foot off the ground. The quad felt like a normal RC heli

Flight 2 I switched to stable mode. Powered up, the quad seemed a bit jumpy with its motors making small sudden movements. I then engaged position hold and alt hold mode the quad jumped up 1 foot, blanked left, and flew into the wall. I have the throttle hold switch programmed to drop the throttle to 0%, which I engaged, however took me a second to think that I had to also disarm the motors. This resulted in breaking one prop. Unfortunately I don't have any spares yet.

Lesson learnt, read the damn instructions! On reading the instructions fully, I realised that I need to do the PID tuning fully before using the position mode.

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones

Email me when people reply –

Replies

  • Moderator
    I've ordered a new APM which will allow me to figure out whether the output 4 (rear motor) issue is a hardware fault (ie faulty soldering)
This reply was deleted.

Activity