Well, I finally did it. First in history? Powered sideways flips (I give it a shot of negative pitch when it's upside down).
At the end, I flipped it all around and then "bailed out" with stabilize, and it worked fine. My wife couldn't keep the camera on it though.
After this, I tried to see what would happen if I pulled it full pitch up, as I know it hits a limit when vertical according to Leonard. So... this is not a good thing to do on a heli anyway, it did all kinds of nasty things and I thought I'd lose it. Flipped to stabilize and it saved itself. It may have accumulated a DCM error because it seemed to have some "leans" for a while and then it was OK.
This may seem trivial to anybody who flies helicopters, but it's taken a lot of hard work to get to this point! We now have a working acro mode for flybarless helis, which includes access to full negative pitch with a softer setting available in Stabilize mode. Basically there's an "idle up" running in the APM.
Thanks to Leonard for the great stabilized acro mode!
Rob
Comments
Phillip, thanks! Yeah... I do know how to use a camera, but it's always a case of being too distracted by the flying/programming part, and the camera is usually an afterthought. In this case it was one of those "Honey, come out and see this! Hey, try to film it with this camera, yeah just press that button" moments. ;)
Same deal with the auto mission. It had gotten too dark to film really... but I wanted to get it. Too distracted to think about the camera.
Robert, very impressive videos! Looks like you've made a lot of progress.
On the video, many cameras have a focus on infinity setting that is good for filming small vehicles, it prevents the auto focus from kicking in when you don't want it too.
Congrats, looks good.
Hi Robert, that's cool... congratulations!!!
Only rolls, yes.
Your night flying looks awesome, like an UFO comes in to land.
Awesome! Congrats Robert!!!
Congrats ! Robert you are one of the pioneers! Have a Good Day!
Manfred, if you try a flip, you have to do a rolling flip. If you try to pitch-flip it, it gets stuck at 90° and does ugly things. The earth frame acro controller can't handle flips.
Robert
Great job, thanks for doing this great work.
I might slowly go to try that Acro flying....
That is so cool. Time for me to get back into helicopters.
And here's another video of an auto mission at 10 m/s (36 km/h). Sorry the quality is so bad, it was getting dark, and my video software made it worse. The copter did really really well maintaining altitude now. I'm going to try 15 and then 20 later. The only problems I had was with the take-off and landing, that is why I just did an RTL instead.
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