I'm pleased to report that after an initial successful flight at Easter I have my plane back in the air (helped by finding somewhere in London to fly it), this time with the full weight of the GoPro and corresponding ballast attached.
Its a stock EasyStar with added CF in the wing spars and up the tail to strengthen it, with the addition of APM2.5+3DR and a GoPro hung at the root of the port wing. To balance some lead shot is in the starboard wing towards the tip.
It went up for six or seven flights trying to dial in the PIDs, immediately obvious was how sluggish and wind affected it was. I think it may be underpowered now as I had to spend quite a lot of time at full throttle but this might simply be the lack of finesse that comes with lack of experience.
I was running the EasyStar PIDs from the wiki as a starting place although I wasn't pleased with how these responded. The roll was accurate but sluggish and turn performance under auto was very slow, possibly down to low bank angle.
Pitch wasn't much better even in manual, I had to up the servo travel limits before I got a sensible amount of elevator control.
I increased the roll P gain a couple of clicks and managed to get the wings wagging but the EasyStar file includes quite a bit of I gain which none of the other config files use. If the wind stays calm I'm going to take it out again today with a blank canvas, no I or D gain and dial in the P from scratch, then the D and finally a little bit of I.
A great positive I can take from this is there is almost no vibration on the camera despite no efforts to damp it. I just stuck it to the bottom of the wing with a sticky pad. Because my ambitions for this plane is mostly aerial topography the camera position is optimised for looking straight down but for one video I pointed the camera ahead. This was the last run of the day with the plane following a square pattern. It didn't really follow it very well but we can work on the details!
Comments
Maybe you can try auto takeoff. I'm using it for my Sirius. I like it.
I make it in Auto mode. Once take off, I switch back to stabilize mode.
No need assistance anymore for hand launch.
Oh, also I was hand launching all day in manual/stabilise. I just gave it the full beans and my girlfriend gave it a strong armed lob. Back in Easter I couldn't hand launch it at all, it crashed nose in time after time. Very frustrating. Then I realised the motor was reversed...
Nano: I'm not sure as I don't have accurate scales that can do that weight at the moment. I think I calculated I added 200 grams for the camera, 70 grams for the ballast then the weight of the RX and APM. I'll track down some scales and let you know.
Erman: Its a designated flying area within the park so I just rocked up. Didn't see anyone but a few dog walkers, no other fliers Saturday or Sunday (unless you count a kite)
There is a stipulation that you must have insurance in the rules here but nothing that BMFA membership wouldn't cover you for.
I was taken aback by just how big the park is, its staggering. Plenty of room for buzzing around without bothering people. The flying area is defined as 200m ish from the signpost, and while there is a road quite close on two sides the other two sides are very open so I'm sure you could stretch that a bit.
Nice landscape!
May I know your AUW?
I believe it difficult to hand launch? Did you use auto take off to hand launch?