Good Morning!!

I am writing this morning about a different topic than my build because I am mad at the post office.  My RVJET should have arrived two days ago and I am still without a plane.  It is in the teens outside today so I thought it would be a perfect assembly day.  Instead, I am going to talk about a safety system I have been thinking about for our drones.

Have you ever had a lipo suddenly dump its charge in the air?  Maybe, you have had a particularly good day cloud surfing and lost track of time or distance?   I would like to come up with an emergency battery switching system for such occasions.  This post will be more of a brainstorm and ideas of what  capabilities would be needed.  I can get into hardware/firmware specifics as it is developed.

I think the first thing people are going to ask about is weight.  People are pushing X-8's to 3.5kg, I think the RVJET can push it close to 3-3.5 with batteries and cameras for long flights.  The Skyhunter claims 20-25,000 mah worth of battery capacity.  So I would think that you would want at least 20% of main pack capacity in your reserve pack.  The test plane that I will use for this is an old 8ft Telemaster.  These are docile craft with very predictable flight characteristics.  I have modified this with motors in wing pods that will have 10000 mah capacity each (two 6s 5000)  I would have to add a 2000 mah battery to each wing to give me the reserve battery power.  In a plane that can easily go all up at 7kg we have some room to add some batteries and hardware for a switcher.  I think the last time I had it all up with mapping cameras it was around 5kg.  With two 2450mah packs at 400g each I should be able to keep the necessary items well below the two kilogram cushion I have.

We have an air frame and an idea.  I have not thought of all the parameters or what all needs to be measured to indicate a possible failure.  The first and easiest is when you have discharged to 20% of main power that batteries could switch to auxiliary power.  Severe voltage fluctuations, amperage flow drops, internal resistance spikes, overheating are few of the possible indicators of a faulty cell or power system.  This will be an open project and I welcome any and all collaborators.  If you have other ideas of what is needed in the firmware or the hardware, please comment.  I think this would be a system independent of autopilots and osd's for cross platform integration.  I think that you would be able to see when it switches to auxiliary power by a spike or drop in the battery level indicator on osd's.  Another use would be a battery cutoff.  If you are running multiple parallel packs.  If a single pack is faulty it can cut it off from the system so it doesn't draw down the good pack.  These are all initial thoughts.  Thank you for reading and I hope that you have happy and safe flying.

In my first blog post I did not realize that it was published.  I thought I had saved it as a draft.  I am sure there are typos and grammar mistakes.  My apologies.  Hopefully, I will get this one right before I publish.  Thank you, dear reader, for your patience

Ok, this post will cover an overview of my RVJET with the new MyFlyDream Autopilot.  Many of you are familiar with their antenna tracking system.  I believe the autopilot came out around third quarter 2013.  I received my autopilot in the mail yesterday and will receive the RVJET today.  I want to qualify that I am not being paid or sponsored for this post.  My impressions are that of a consumer and developer.  I do not want make the impression that I am advertising.  I will be working in the near future with other airframes and two other autopilots.  This is my first build in 4 years and I want to get in the air fairly soon.  I will be using a mixture of new parts and components that I have had in storage.  I will detail what is new and what will change in the future to make this system more robust.  This build will serve as a quick FPV, property monitoring and testing.  In future posts I will reveal newly announced technology that we are experimenting with and capabilities we are hoping to achieve with both flgiht systems and ground control stations.  Convenience and ease of portability will be a lot of my focus.  Now on to the build ideas and details.

RVJET with stock servos and recommended power pack (will detail later)

Zippy Compact 3s 5000mah LiPo 25c Series (will run two in parallel in the future for endurance)  (Thinking about a reserve/emergency battery switching with a 2000 mah cell in the future)

MyFlyDream Autopilot (will experiment with pixhawk and parallela boards in the future)

CasteCreations CC BEC

JR XP9303 Air Tx w Spektrum module and JR R921 DSM2 Rx (will be switching to Taranis with 1W Openlrs Module and 1W module hacked into a Rx for flight control and two way communication with Mission Planner and Droid Planner, joystick control and separate camera ground control through a single radio link ) *this will be detailed in its own blog in the near future.  This is exciting stuff!

GS will be a either or a combination of a Lenovo laptop, Samsung Galaxy 3, and an Asus Transformer Infinity Android  (for now I will be using a JY-MCU HC-06 Bluetooth for data connection with android planner on the ground)

FPV Equipment *archaic - five years old lol

KX191 from Range Video.  I will be upgrading to several different cameras including (FLIR, Pixam Ultra DNR, and TBS69 for night flying)

900mhz 500mw AV Transmitter w IBCrazy air screw

900mhz dual rx with oracle diversity

IB Crazy Mad Mushroom and 14 dbi patch antenna

(I will be purchasing 1.3 ghz system.  I am hoping that I can get away with not having to use my xbee extends past intial phase.  I am hoping to make a link with the 433 uhf for telemetry and flight control.)  (I also will be purchasing the AAT tracker from MyFlyDream as well.  I will probably use a helical spiral antenna with the tracker.)

Two types of goggles.  I will be upgrading in the near future.  There will be dedicated blog posts for the ground station.  Everything with explanations in parenthesis will be expanded on and have its own focus. I will also talk about why I chose the components that I have. The ground station will especially be exciting as it evolves.  I have some ideas so stay tuned!!

Hello DIY Drone community,

I would like to reintroduce myself.  I would first like to say that I am absolutely amazed at what so many people have accomplished in the last four years I have been away from drones.  I was invited into the open source community at the time and did not really understand what it was or why it would be so amazing.  It is one of the few regrets that I have.  I started back in 2006 getting into drones.  I built a few telemasters, gliders, and many single rotor helicopters.  I used ardi boards and even purchased an original rvosd and an original attopilot.  These are still in my parts bin.  I was even one of the early members of this forum. (In fact, I am hoping that administration can help me to merge and old account from here.)  I actually was building an interesting aerial media business.  In 2008, I was a presenter at the International Air Law Symposium at Southern Methodist University.  A branch of my company was beginning to assist in aircraft accident investigations with FAA, aviation industry and plaintiff council.  It was really going well.  However, fourth quarter '08 hit and everyone stopped spending money.  Especially on something different like civilian UAV's.  I made it through most of '09 with a few dwindling contracts but little money for maintenance much less innovation.  It seemed to be the wrong timing.  I worked in a different direction.

Fast forward to summer '13 and I had a renewed inspiration in RC.  I started to read about helicopters again.  I started flirting with hobby sites.  I started to really get into looking at multirotors.  The part that finally was a kick in the guts was the AR Drone from Parrot.  I could not believe what this toy was capable of doing.  A toy!!  I spent tens upon tens of thousands of dollars on UAV's.  I used $3000 stabilizers on helicopters, $1500 infrared FC's on planes, all to no avail of something as stable and easy to control as the AR Drone.  Back in 2008-2009 people were starting to experiment with them and some had them flying primitively it seemed but the only game in town was Draganflyer out of Canada.  They had it down and they wanted paid.  I don't blame them but I had already spent too much down a dead end direction.  So here we are in third quarter 2013.  I am now looking at multicopters big time..  I would go out to my storage and see all my old uav's and rc stuff.  It would just bum me out.  It is close to Thanksgiving and finally pull the trigger.  I bought a DJI Phantom 2 Vision.  Am I glad that I did.  OMG.  It does have its limits but it is an incredibly capable multicopter for the price.  I am not pitching for them but wow!!  It has lead me back here and am I excited!!  I purchased an ecilop frame and I will be taking my time putting parts together for it.  But my plane.  I want to talk about what I want to do.  Now when I go to my shed I have been way thrilled at what I still have.

As I am thinking about purchasing updated things I wanted to examine what I still have.  I wanted to see if everything I had is obsolete.  Surprising, I still have quite a few things that I can still use. (The benefits of many crashes I guess)  I still have lots of servos.  A complete diversity 900 mhz video system.  I even found an original attopilot with ir stabilization unused and a RVOSD V1 undused.  Is that a kick in the pants? haha  I found the parts to completely rebuild my TREX 600 with flybar and enough parts to build a second one.  I even have a front mount gimbal and underslung mount for the helicopters.  My batteries is a different story.  They are mostly bad and none but some rx packs that are worthy for ground testing only.  But I have two 1010C chargers with balancers and an E-station BC6 with balancers.  That is awesome.  I really could not believe all that I found.  I am not going to complete the list for sake of trying to not get too boring in this blog.