T-Rex 450 on a 15 Waypoint Mission

As promised last time, here is another successful mission with a T-Rex 450.

The day looked very good for flying, but as we arrived on the flying field the wind picked up very much with gusts.  Despite the wind I flew anyway, because I had a friend with me who also flies T-Rex 450.

After the mission was successfully completed he was very much impressed how the little heli mastered the mission and how well the APM performed. He actually considers now to fit his heli with an APM.

 

The Heli was flying pretty much on track; the altitude was sometimes off by about 4m.

You have always to see things in scale; this condition was for the little 1kg heli like to fly with a Robinson in gale force wind.

http://youtu.be/7D-f9-ZYhz8

Her are all the mission flies, log files and parameter files.

2012-10-10 12-01-31Mission600.tlog

WP600M-Mision Loiter.txt

Trex450 Parameter 10.10.12.param

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  • What do you think of an additional yaw mode called "Weathervane".  I wanted to make a mode where the heli's nose automatically faces the direction it is flying.  I think it would be nice for just flying around, also for FPV.

    What do you think about it Manfred?

  • Manfred, yes, for sure that is correct.  A heli should turn nose forward to fly, and it for sure does not in RTL.  I will see if that is something I can fix for the next release.

    Edit: yes, I found it, it looks easy to fix, I'll just run it by the other devs.

  • Oh, and BTW, on your gasser heli.  I have run an APM on a airplane with a 56 Saito.  It thumps pretty good, but it didn't have any problem.  Good vibration damping is of course, necessary.  But it might be worth a shot.  You could run it up with no blades installed, and see if it misbehaves.

    Also, if you have a flybar on it, you can check the parameter for "flybar mode".  Then in Acro mode, it will fly in full manual.  Just like a normal heli.  So if the vibrations cause the DCM to behave badly, it won't have any effect.  In Flybarred Acro mode, it passes the stick inputs directly to the CPPM mixer with absolutely no attitude or rate control at all.

  • Manfred, please try lowering your "Tilt" parameter to something like 5.  This is a feedforward parameter which forces a tilt forward on top of the PID.  Your Nav PID parameters are actually probably pulling back because the Tilt param default is more for a quad which has much higher drag. 

    Jason just pointed this out on the devlist where we're discussing my near disaster of a mission.

  • Manfred! Well done yet again! Just awesome!

  • Excellent !

  • amazing achivement manfred. this is a feather in the cap of DIY drones community. you have prooved how powerful the APM code is. this is the ultimate challenge for APM code. because the heli's are inherently very unstable. your achivement has put solid confidence in the APM code for DIY community. i had been trying to do the same on align 450 but could not go beyond stabilized flight. can u share which servoes you have used. did u use external gyro for yaw or used ACM yaw gyro directly. which make of blade sets did u use. r u on APM2.0 board or APM2.5  board. which was the GPS reciver. thanx for sharing PID's.

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