I did Manfred Dickgiesser foam ear plug mounting for my 450 flamewheel quad with APM 2.5 running v2.9.1 and MPU6K_FILTER = 20. APM is mounted on a thin aluminum plate with double-sided foam tape. A ¼" thick plate of Polycarbonate plastic is taped to the bottom of the aluminum plate between the orange foam ear plugs to give added mass to the mounting assembly. The ear plugs are glued to the top plate of the quad frame with Goop. Seems to work well for controlling XYZ Accel's. Z data value analysis in an Excel spreadsheet shows a Standard Deviation of 2.02 for continuous 2300 sample points.
The ear plugs survived their first crash. I accidently switched into RTL without knowing and flew it into the ground.
I would have never thought to use foam ear plugs for vibration mounting. What a cool idea...
Comments
I have been using basically the same setup for about 6 months and it seems to work well for me on my custom quad.. Mine are mounted on screws that stick up from the top plate. I put a hole through the earplug and use a washer and nut to kind of compress the plug slightly so that it will expand back out slightly to grab the plate better.
I also like the earplug dampening concept. Somewhat the same for me since yesterday afternoon, but full length plugs to have identical height and glued both sides with contact glue.
The ply board holds APM 2.5, the turret holds GPS on top, receiver on one side, and led module on the other.
Still have to measure the result.
I am setting up a F450 quad and this looks like a good way to go. One question on APM's. Is there a reason to prefer top mount vs side mount for a quad such as this. Would the side mount APM have any advantages or disadvantages vs the top mount. I have one of each and haven't decided which way to go. I would think that you could get by with shorter servo wires with the sidemount. Would vibration coupling from the servo wires be reduced from one or the other?
Greg McHugh
Good design guys. I like the fact you stuck the APM onto a large square aluminum plate. Nice wide-set dampers, with a low CG height. This helps prevent angular oscillation (rolly-polly) from being a problem.
This is a good start to simple and effective dampening.
Rob Question - are you saying the aluminum plate alone is a good RF insulator? Or did you surround the APM with aluminum? I've been trying to figure out what is the best interference dampening from the ECSs and GPS.
@Jim: I really like it! Except for the earplugs i did the same on my lamewheel 450 with a 10x10cm alu-plate. I am using apm 2.0 without external gps (just onboard mtk) and i found that the alu really helps the magnetometer and the gps function. Concerning your gps: do you have some supportive foam/etc under it? I think otherwise it could start resonating at some point. Do you have 2 lipos hangig around in the air? (Probably not, but it looks like:) )
Cheers Rob
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