So I have some vacations coming up and already have some quads and a hex I figured I needed a fixed wing to round out my aerial camera fleet. (for now) heh. So I took the plunge and picked myself up an X8 to fill up with electronics.
I'm running an ArduPilot Purple, with a Castle 75 esc waiting for Hobbyking to drop of my new Scorpion motor until then I have a 700W max 50Amp local hobby store motor to power the bird. I'm running 1.2 video feeding through MinimOSD with a Sony 720 line mini cam. I have a roll and tilt GoPro mount in the works that I'll post up some pics when I can get some play time on the router this weekend. Communication is done through a Futaba 10C 72Mhz and some 900Mhz XBees.
I've only made a few mods for now like adding a second motor mount plate that bolt through the foam to the outer plate.
I made some electronics trays and filled in the lower camera cut out with some foam and Gorilla glue.
I ended up bringing the control linkage up through the wing, leaving it on the bottom seemed like a bad idea for a belly lander. I have never flown a or built a fixed wing, but I said the same about the multirotors and DIYDrone's gear and community made it simple, awesome and enjoyable. Only crashes were ah-hem user error. So I'm hoping for the same luck with this bird. I do have tons of hours now on RealFlight sim just to make sure I feel comfortable with the controls. That being said any input from from you guys will be greatly appreciated. I'll update this blog as things progress and as I get the camera mount going. But for now heres some more eye candy. Be happy and safe all!
Comments
Actually the "simple" wing has a 2.1 m wingspan, and is very heavy. It's scary to hand-launch.
We generally hand-launch auto-takeoff with the X8. We also have a simple wing that we bungee launch with auto-takeoff. It works pretty well. I'll probably add a bungee launch hook to the X8, 'cause it's kinda cool to bungee launch, but when I hand-launch it, there's a little bit of me in the video each time :-)
Ive done auto takeoff with my APM plane and it works well but I still havent been willing to try auto landing yet.
We're actually not completely happy with the parameters so far, especially in wind. In light wind, it does pretty well, but in heavy wind, it hunts for the navigation track a lot. We're still working on that. We also find that auto-land with the X8 is a bit rough, and have to flare a bit manually to help it out. On one attempt, the motor failed to stop spinning close to the landing waypoint, and we broke a prop; so: make sure to cut power before touchdown!
Hey Kaotic. I got your comment on my YouTube video, friend request sent. Next time I've got the APM connected, I'll grab the parameters for you. We're flying this Sunday for sure, so it shouldn't be longer than that.
I have some updated pids I will post tomorrow which resulted in an almost perfect flight this afternoon.
@ Toby Your the man! Thanks for a starting point. I plan to test it out this weekend. I have her all hooked up and programmed with your starting PIDs. She seems to react as expected with the exception that if I put it level and flip to a stabilized mode the it kicks up the right aileron a bit. The movements seem right other wise, I pull up it tries to push down, just that aileron seems off a bit, it looks level in the Mission planner. I have also abandoned the old XBees they have always been a pain in the arse, will swap out with new 3DR radios when they come back in stock. Any insight on the right aileron? I guess I should upload a video to show what I am seeing.
I had a good calm day this morning so flight number 8 allowed me to really focus on improving the PID settings.
Still no crashes, so I am stoked with how easy this plane is to use. Its just landing that is the challenge.
The pids are still not perfect, the NAV pids are very close but the pitch pid still needs a bit of work as I have a 0.5Hz pulse that needs ironing out. If you have pitch pids that work, I would leave them where they are until I have this sorted.
The big problem with this plane is its size relative to a lot of the models people are using, it takes quite a long time for servo movements to result in a change in direction. As a result, I've had to dial in quite a lot more nav differential than I am used to using so that it doesn't over correct and snake all over the place. Also the cross track gain is way down.
It needs quite a lot of servo gain, but quite a low nav gain. This causes turns to be fairly tight, but doesn't result in minor course corrections causing major snaking.
Give these pids a try and please update this thread with any improvements / corrections. Once we have a file that works well on multiple planes, then we can submit a proper param file for the X8.
Yes, please submit the PID's. I would like to "barrow" them.
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