The return to home on the YS-X6 is very impressive and particularly how stable it touches down and then turns the motors off.  Even in full manual mode the copter hardly wanders at all.

The main down side of this ZeroUav system is user manual is absolutely appalling and virtually useless. Also the  GCS for PC is not very intuitive at all. The wording translation from Chines in many areas  is very bad. For the price tag this should be better than it is. The waypoint upgrades are not cheap and you need at least the basic upgrade from 4 way points to 16 waypoints to get auto power off on the motors.

This weekend Ill go try out some auto navigation flight tests.I have to say that apart from the poor documentation, the flight behavior and stability is very impressive.

I made up these hi tech shock absorber legs for my grandsons quad we are building.  Considering the hours I often spend to find a better design for making copter legs that don't disintegrate on every hard landing, It took me about 10 min to stop laughing from the simplicity of the brilliance of this light bulb moment..

I have now set up my battery charger power supply unit with a cable long enough to supply power for my small quad copter for inside testing. This will save the life of the batteries as well avoid the hassle of swapping them over constantly for when doing PID tuning etc. Only thing its not powerful enough to fly my X8 quad and trips the over load at about 29amps. Ill try see if ii will run my hex next. Here is the video of the small quad run

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM4oZEulyqg&feature=youtu.be

Im in two minds about mounting on rubber rings and particularly if it allows the board to wobble even ever so slightly . Any movement at all of the board relative to the crafts frame I suspect will cause oscillation and probably jitters during quick maneuvers. . I'm more in favor of adding vibration dampening pads to the arms and frame rather than suspending the AMP board. Take for example if the motors are causing a horizontal circular vibration from the motors and this circular rotation is say clockwise, then this is without doubt is going to affect the yaw if the board is moving differently to the frames yaw. So if anything I feel the oring idea is in some cases more counter productive than what its trying to achieve. The APM board in my view must be rock solid fixed to the frame to be able to quickly and accurately read what the aircraft is doing. Any compromise even if only very minute will without doubt affect the stability of the aircraft. We have to realise that if the board can be so easily affected from such small amounts of vibration and it is so sensitive, then the idea of APM board suspension mounts possibly is not a good idea

I feel some of the people having trouble with the PID tuning could be because their boards are moving and are not firmly fixed the the frames.

One method I have used to dampen vibration is to wrap a metal rod in some soft rubber and then slid this into the arm tube just under the motor. The rod floating in the rubber wrap takes quite a bit of the high frequency vibration out of the arms.

Just my thought on this.

Barometer Issues!?

Ok, here is another problem I've spotted in the mind field of hardware issues and for people who continually bang their heads trying to fix them through PID tuning. .

If you have a housing that is covering over all of your electronics such as a plastic container,.. then when you descend or ascend quickly the pressure inside the container changes and gives your barometer an false reading.

For example if you descend quickly the pressure increases inside the container making the barometer think that you are descending faster than you actually are. So the APM will try to compensate this out and try to increase the throttle and this probably cause a bouncing behavior some people are finding happens .

Some may argue that the barometer cant be this sensitive, but I beg to differ because the pressure variation it can sense for the pressure variances in altitude that it works off is very fine. The pressure change inside the container even for horizontal flight will be enough to for it to sense the changes of pressure in the container.

This also includes pressure zones around the incoming and out going air stream around the props if they are to close to the container or even if you have an open center frame the pressure zone around the props can possibly still affect the barometer

I'm considering some fixes for this such as a tube that has a H tube branch at its end and that sits above or below the center board.

I would be interested to know what others view and ideas are on this. .

http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/barometer-issues-and-pid-tuning