Share your drone info thread

Brian K July 14, 2013 at 1:39pm

As my first post and a way to introduce myself, I thought I'd post a description of my scratchbuilt quad. I apologize if this is long but I want to include some details as it might help out someone or give them ideas for their own project.

When I started this project back in March I was 100% new to RC models. From learning the very first steps of setting up and binding my Spektrum controller, setting up the APM and doing some successful auto flights, to programming the JDIOBoard to get my LEDs to do what I want, I literally started from the ground up. Right from the start I wanted to make a drone...at the time regular RC model flight wasn't what I was interested in but during the last few months that's changed (largely due to watching episode after episode of the awesome FliteTest youtube channel!).

A quick bit on my background. I spent my 20s as a programmer, first creating simple Windows apps and then later on embedded systems. My 30s are currently being spent as a helicopter maintenance engineer.

Ok, where to begin? After cutting my teeth on the awesome 1SQ miniquad by Heli-Max, I decided that multirotor stuff was for me. A friend of mine happens to be neighbours with one of the developers on the APM project and that lead me to the Arducopter and DIYDrones.

Not wanting to just buy a kit, I opted to build my frame from scratch. I wanted it to be light, strong, and cheap. I cheated by using scrap composite material from work. The first frame was made with nomex honeycomb plates (more on that below) and child sized graphite hockey sticks:

It flew, pretty well actually, but I knew I could do better.

Enter mkIII (I've been through a few revisions of the frame):

mkIII had several improvements.

First, the nomex panels. Nomex is a sort of waxy paper. The panels are made by taking a nomex honeycomb structure and sandwiching it between two very thin layers of fiberglass and epoxy. The result is a extremely lightweight and relatively strong panel. In the photo above you can see that I bonded two layers together for the main frame, several pieces were bonded to make the arms, and I used loose panels to carry the avionics. Total frame weight, with all hardware but no motors, esc, or electronics, was something like 600g. Very light and very rigid. Nomex also happens to absorb vibration pretty well, which leads me to the second improvement:

Isolating the APM from vibration came in two stages. The blue isolators I found laying around in the shop. They are very similar to the black ones that come with the RCTimer GoPro gimbal but a bit more robust. They held up the entire avionics shelf. The APM itself is also sitting on your friend and mine, the ever popular Moon Gel.

The results, with unbalanced props and motors (that were also misaligned because I was lazy with the frame alignment):

Not bad!

In the above photo you can see that I added a second shelf and installed LED strips:

These are controlled by the JDIOBoard and marks the point where I started getting into the programming side of things. Working from the sample code, I got the LEDs to perform different functions based on MAVLink messages. As it stands right now, when the APM is DISARMED the forward (white) and aft (blue) lights are off and the left (red) and right (green) pulse. When the GPS gets 3d lock, the aft lights go on steady. When the APM is ARMED, all lights go steady.

Here is my setup, as it was not even a week ago:

APM moved to the top shelf to get it away from the power distrubution system. Metal tape also provides a bit more isolation from electrical interference (not much though). Telemetry added, fed to my phone using the awesome Droidplanner app!

I've flown many missions with the above setup and it's worked great. However, I wanted more. I wanted a hex.

Despite how well the nomex frame worked, I decided to forgo the scratchbuild for the new drone and concentrate more on the Arduino programming side of things. Here's a sneak peak of what I had built a couple days ago:

Since then I've tuned the RCTimer gimbal, wired up the motors and escs, and did the basic Arducopter 3.0.1 setup.

Planned improvements: external mag once the GPS + mag unit becomes available from Canadadrones (Dany has helped me a lot and everyone in Canada should buy from him!). I've been working on the code to get the JDIOBoard to initialize the gimbal controller. I'm also cooking up a rigging pin to hold the gimbal in place during initialization and to keep it from flopping around in transport. Yes, this pin will include a "Remove Before Flight" tag ;). I also made a killswitch to make it easier and safer to kill the power if something goes wrong on the ground (I had a few close calls with the other drone trying to quickly disconnect the battery).

And that's it so far!

Roberto Bonfim May 11, 2013 at 7:25pm

frame: TBS Discovery
controller/autopilot: APM 2.5
esc: Turnigy Plash 18A
motors: L2215J 900kv Turnigy
propellers: SF 10 x 4.5
battery: 3s 5000mAh LiPo

Telemetry: 3DR 433MHz

Video: Gopro 3 White

FPV: Fatshark 5.8GHz

total weight: ~1750gr
flying time: 13 min.

radio: Spektrum Dx6i

photos:

Jorn Deruyck May 11, 2013 at 9:01am

frame: Custom aluminium CNC milled
controller/autopilot: APM 2.5
esc: RXtimer 40A with simonk firmware
motors: 4
propellers: 14 x 4.7
motor to motor distance: 580mm

battery: 1 - 3 x 3s 5000mAh LiPo
total weight: ~2000gr
flying time: not tested yet, but should be 10min with 1 x 5000mAh battery and 20min with the 3 x 5000mAh batteries it was designed for

radio: Devo 10 with deviation firmware
video/osd: -
other: -

Misc (hacks/mods): -

photos:

John Stäck March 25, 2013 at 4:27pm

frame: Styrofoam rings, 170mm diameter (inner diameter 130mm). Some wood pieces (4x8mm I think)
controller/autopilot: Crius AIOP2, MegaPirateNG
esc: Turnigy Plush 12A
motors: HK 2725-1600
propellers: 5x4.5
motor to motor distance: 170mm
battery: Zippy Compact 4S 1000mAh 25C
total weight: 600g
flying time: 6-7 min
radio: HK6DF
video/osd: Nope.
other: Strange indoor quad. Not very stable.

John Stäck March 25, 2013 at 4:19pm

frame: 10x20mm wood (pine), 2mm plywood
controller/autopilot: APM2.5, ArduCopter 2.9.1
esc: RCTimer 20A
motors: RCTimer 2217-800
propellers: 10x4.7
motor to motor distance: 55cm
battery: 1800mAh 3S 20C (RCTimer)
total weight: 1100g
flying time: 10 min
radio: HK6DF
video/osd: FatShark 5.8GHz
other: Sonar. Landing gear made out of pipe insulation (picture shows some piano wire loops that didn't work)

Andrew Girgen February 4, 2013 at 10:56am

Hello everyone...

One of my first posts so I guess I'll introduce myself first. My name is Andrew and I currently reside in the Daytona Beach, FL area. I have been flying RC for many years and recently got into FPV with a skywalker X8 running a full Eagle Tree OSD/Diversity/Telemetry setup.

As I'm also into photography, I got interested in building a camera platform that would eventually be able to carry my Canon T4I.

So this is what I came up with:

*S6 hex air frame from www.sto.org.tw

*S6-Pro Gimbal from www.sto.org.tw
*STO 530KV motors
*Generic 40A esc
*APM 2.5 with GPS, 3DR data radio and 3DR current sensor for flight control
*Paris Sirrus multiwii board for gimbal control
*DX8 and AR8000 TX/RX combo

*Turnigy Nano-Tech 4S2P 10000 MAh

I didn't find much info on STO but they had a lot of videos of their products and they seemed to be of pretty good quality. I took the risk and ordered the air frame, motors and gimbal. For the most part, I am happy. I can see that I will probably have to modify the gimbal if I'm going to get truly professional results... It has a bit of slop that could be taken out with some better components. I will probably upgrade the MultiWii controller as it doesn't seem to want to hold the horizon level no matter how much tweeking I do. I learn something new every day tho so it might just be something I'm overlooking. The MultiWii board leaves a little to be desired in the area of documentation (esp. documentation regarding using it as a stand alone 3 axis gimbal controller). The pitch axis is locked in pretty well, but with the roll axis the servo keeps up fine but when it settles the mount isn't level. For example: from a level position roll the gimbal 5 degrees, the servo tracks fine with proper speed but when they stop the gimbal settles at say 4 degrees. I'm not sure what to do to improve this. Overall, im pretty happy with it but I havent started messing around with the yaw axis or added manual control to the system. So we shall see...

The only other gripe I have about this setup is the motors from STO. They only have a single grub screw securing the bell to the shaft. After just one tip over, the grub screw on both front motors stripped so now the props slip a little. This is evident in the copter always wanting to be in forward motion. I'm guessing this is due to less power being transferred to the front two motors because of the slip. I ordered a set of bolt on prop shafts that will hopefully alleviate this problem. In the mean time, I just tuned up the APM for a good, stabilized hover. This was very easy and required very little tweaking. It flew almost perfect right out of the box (See the first video)...

Anyway, thanks for reading and if anyone has any tips I'm all ears!

APG

Really boring video of me hovering. Hopefully I'll have something better soon.

First Flight:

http://youtu.be/-DyOZmuSG_Y

(I cant get my videos to embed here?! not sure what I'm doing wrong...)

I will post the second and third flights after they finish uploading.

Allen Martin January 29, 2013 at 5:14am

frame: Finwing Penguin (ReadyMadeRC)
controller/autopilot: APM 2.0
esc: 60A (Finwing)
motors: 2815 (Finwing)
propellers: APC 9x7.5e
battery: 3S 5k (Grayson Hobby)

total weight: -- lbs
flying time: 20 minutes mixed flight

radio: Spektrum DX8
video: 600tvl camera + 1.3ghz 1.5 watt video tx (Ready Made RC)
osd: MinimOSD 1.1
other: 433mhz radio link, air speed sensor

Jason January 21, 2013 at 5:27am

frame: Quadcopter (Modified JDrones Hexa, scaled down)
controller/autopilot: APM1
esc: 30A (JDrones)
motors: 880Kv (JDrones)
propellers: 10x47, APC (CanadaDrones)
battery: 4S 4500 mah (Turnigy nano-tech)
radio: Futaba T7C

boyuhu December 17, 2012 at 9:11pm

Here goes information about my quad.
frame: diy (Steadicam)
controller/autopilot: APM2
esc: 60A (HY)
motors: 670Kv (emax)
propellers: 14x7, APC ()
motor to motor distance: -- 700 mm
battery: 6S 10000mAh ()
total weight: 6000g
flying time: 10minutes (average)
radio: 3DR
video/osd: none
other: 3DR, GPS/Mag, Attopilot current sensor

weelian soh December 16, 2012 at 12:15am

Here's my latest APM2.5 equipped Quad. It is a Reptile500 Frame which is a TBS Discovery inspired design.

REPTILE500 Frame from Himodel.com
Motors - AX-2810Q-750KV - Hobbyking
Props - GemFan Carbon Nylon 11x4.7
ESCs - Hobbyking 30A UBEC SimonK'd from sgdrone.com
Flight Controller - APM2.5 (2.81 quad firmware) with Ublox GPS from sgdrone.com
Battery - HK 2200 Turnigy 20-30c Lipo
AUW - 1.4kg with GoPro

Since I'm using old batteries with many cycles in them, the flight time is estimated to be around 7-8 minutes, with new batteries, I reckon a flight time of close to 10 minutes.

I've got a more detailed overview at this link.

Share your drone info thread

Replies

Activity