I am thinking about building a drone with a reaper airframe from nitroplanes http://www.nitroplanes.com/mq9.html
The AP would be the Ardupilot mega is there anybody with experience with this particular airframe ?
Is there enough space inside to house all the hardware and can this model be run with nitro?
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I am currently working on this airframe. Here are some photos up to where I am at.
http://picasaweb.google.com/fisher.matt/FIAUAVPhotos?authkey=Gv1sRg...
I don't know about the Reaper but I have the Raven from the same manufacturer and distributor.
http://www.nitroplanes.com/projet-003-rq11.html
I haven't flown it yet as I'm still waiting for parts and trying to figure out where to fly it best (I'm in the city) but I can tell you that it has a ton of room inside. I'm thinking of fitting a real (consumer) camera (will take the casing off and just install the board and lens), a simple VGA camera for navigation, and an APM + its parts.
I noticed the raptor is a little bit smaller but still sitting at less interior space.
What would the best beginner airframe be in your opinion?
I've got two of those. It's huge, and a very big job (weeks) to build. Ironically, it's not the best UAV platform, given that it actually doesn't have much interior room and is very hard to repair when things go wrong. To say nothing of hard to fly (especially land).
I just use mine as a static model to show off at conferences. People think it looks cool.
You can certainly put APM in it, and I supposed you could modify it for nitro (although you'd have serious cooling issues), but unless you're some reason why you want to have a showy model, this is a very poor choice for a UAV that actually gets things done.