Posted by Sesan FESOBI on March 11, 2009 at 12:52pm
Hi everyone,I am new to DIY Drones. I am trying to develop the FCS for a small model aircraft. I want it to be able to perform flight control and navigation functions. Could you tell me what hardware components I can choose (with moderate cost) that can effectively perform these functions?Regards
Hi Sesan. Welcome in the gold mine for diy UAVs. As Chris suggested, go through the discussions and posts. There's a huge lot of information to gather.
I landed here a few months ago and since then, I think I spent more time on this blog than with my wife. Maybe diy UAVs are harder to understand? Well, I'm not quite sure about that...
@ James: sorry too for your airframe. I hope you could salvage the hardware. This remembers me that last spring, I made a nice aerobatic evening flight with my small brushless Extra 330. Suddenly I lost control (Rx probably) during a dive at about 100m from ground. The thing went straight down like an arrow at 250m from me, just behind a terrain elevation. I picked up my bag and stuff and during my walk to the crash scene, as I could not yet see the wreck, a thick cloud of white-grey smoke came up. I ran to the plane; its nose was going up in flames. I was afraid the lipo battery would explode but I could somehow take the plane off the burning nose. The 11V 2200mAh lipo had slipped from its bed straight into the motor shaft protruding backwards... E-flight can be as explosive as gas!
But I have to admit this has nothing to do with the question by Sesan...
The first of advice I'm sure you will find everywhere is to make sure you keep your rc controller attached as your failsafe should your software develop a problem like mine did. I destroyed a plane yesterday testing software which wasn't quite flight ready. Had I have taken of with the original controller and got some height first before switching to software control I might have been able to save the plane.
Comments
I landed here a few months ago and since then, I think I spent more time on this blog than with my wife. Maybe diy UAVs are harder to understand? Well, I'm not quite sure about that...
@ James: sorry too for your airframe. I hope you could salvage the hardware. This remembers me that last spring, I made a nice aerobatic evening flight with my small brushless Extra 330. Suddenly I lost control (Rx probably) during a dive at about 100m from ground. The thing went straight down like an arrow at 250m from me, just behind a terrain elevation. I picked up my bag and stuff and during my walk to the crash scene, as I could not yet see the wreck, a thick cloud of white-grey smoke came up. I ran to the plane; its nose was going up in flames. I was afraid the lipo battery would explode but I could somehow take the plane off the burning nose. The 11V 2200mAh lipo had slipped from its bed straight into the motor shaft protruding backwards... E-flight can be as explosive as gas!
But I have to admit this has nothing to do with the question by Sesan...