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DIY Ghetto Retractable Landing Gear

Posted by benbojangles on January 2, 2015 at 2:36pm

Hello and happy new year.

I decided that I wanted to have retractable landing gear on my hexacopter, but I didn't want to pay the full price for a ready made set (£50/$80). With all the parts I gathered, it came to about £12/$18, so that's quite a saving to be made.

I made a write up article to help others to make their own in hope that we can begin to develop the Ardupilot to enable automatic retracting landing gear like on the DJI systems A2 flight controller. I hope that Droidplanner will have a dedicated button to enable/disable auto landing gear, and also to set the altitude trigger, using either the barometer or gps or optical flow sensors. If anyone has undertaken this suggestion already, i'd be grateful for some links posted in the comments.

Many thanks and happy flying

Tutorial Link: http://dalybulge.blogspot.co.uk/

automatic, dji, gear, landing, retractable, servoless, skids

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Comments

benbojangles January 28, 2015 at 7:57am

thanks for sharing links, looks like the best deal around at the minute for ready made :)
benbojangles January 27, 2015 at 5:53pm

hi gareth, have got a link for the tarot retracts for £10 each. I'd like to find them. Do they include everything such as control board, legs, servo, wires, ubec etc? thanks.
benbojangles January 12, 2015 at 8:11am

an auto retract experiment has begun but I would like some comments:
benbojangles January 3, 2015 at 4:40pm

Brilliant idea Artem. I like the idea of using both the transmitter + telemetry as a method to control failsafe,

and the use of Arduino nano + sonar to control landing gear, - but with signal filtering & override as Rob suggested.

To me these suggestions are possible future implementations for my drone.
Artem January 3, 2015 at 10:18am

I wonder how many people are already using teensy to receive telemetry on their taranisi? It should be relatively easy to trigger on of the PWM pins based on mavlink altitude, RTL, failsafe and error messages.....
benbojangles January 3, 2015 at 8:14am

legs are the ones which came with the s550 frame. Rob you star!
Rob_Lefebvre January 3, 2015 at 5:04am

If the Ardupilot fails, I think the landing gear being up is the least of your problems. ;)

I sure would't slave landing gear to a simple sonar sensor. It will constantly be going up and down in flight at random times. You at least need to employ intelligent signal filtering.
benbojangles January 3, 2015 at 2:25am

Justin - I think, with a separate Arduino running the landing gear code, it would be separate from any failure of the main ardupilot, it would always lower the landing gear when below the sonar detected height. :)
Stuart Brookes January 3, 2015 at 1:41am

Nice Idea on the angle adjustment. I used some similar retacts to make my own. I wanted to make the angle wider as you have done but didn't think of the way you have. Might open up an old one I killed (not flight or use related...the retracts I used used cheese metal for the bit that moved so I drilled and tapped a thread in but was too lazy to remove from the retract while drilling and drilled the lead screw inside! wally!).

Good work
Justin Stiltner January 3, 2015 at 12:45am

I would be happy if we could make the autopilot lower the gear when it does a landing command for whatever reason (loss link, and failsafe included). A command that actually says gear up or down would be great for mission planning, but currently if you loose link you will be landing on your camera.