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Four ArduCopter flights in a row before crashing!

Posted by Aaron Curtis on February 6, 2011 at 9:30pm

After a rough start last month, my ArduCopter CindiLou showed what she could do today. See the attached video for four flights. In the first three the camera is pointing at the Cindi, and in the fourth I have mounted the camera on the forward landing gear so you get to see a rather dramatic crash from the quadcopter's POV. The wind was blowing quite strongly to the south the whole time.

I re-read the section on GPS / altitude hold and realized that I had misunderstood how altitude hold works; that was probably the cause of the crash. I'm looking forward to being competent enough to this thing reliably and am going to repair the quad and get back to flying it as soon as possible. I'm quite happy with the way I mounted my Countour HD camera on the front the landing gear. There's no stabilization and yet the quad video is steadier than the human-captured video!

 

 

 

Tags: arducopter
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  • Developer
    Jason Short February 8, 2011 at 1:24pm
    I've found that when the copter is far away I just push the stick forward and steer it like a car. That works really well. You just keep turning until you see it move in the right direction. I've flown from 200m successfully that way. It's just a dot to me at that point.
  • Aaron Curtis February 7, 2011 at 7:39pm
    And sorry to hear about your crash! Wish I could find some long grass but the closest thing out here is creosote bushes!
  • Aaron Curtis February 7, 2011 at 7:38pm
    John D, thanks for the CA glue advice. I glued a motor mount back together with two-component "Plastic repair epoxy" from Ace hardware and put it in a vise overnight. I can't remember if the crack re-opened before or after I gently crashed it, but I was not impressed with the epoxy and would say CA glue may be a better bet because you can weep it in there like you say. I'll try some on my motor mounts as a quick fix.
  • Aaron Curtis February 7, 2011 at 7:09pm
    John C, that's pretty cool! I want to do the motor mounts, though. I just finished the machine shop class here. I'm tempted to try and machine some motor mounts out of aluminum. The transparent ones are nice for LED mounting though...
  • John C. February 7, 2011 at 2:57pm

    Here's a cool way to get the top disks.

     

    http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/laser-cut-your-own-arducopter?x...

     

  • Aaron Curtis February 7, 2011 at 2:00pm

    John, had a look at your video, looks like your quad's doing great! Why did you need a crash kit? Preemptive?

    I'm trying to decide what to do about the broken plastic disks at the top of my dome. I don't want to buy another frame kit so I think I'll try epoxy...

  • Aaron Curtis February 7, 2011 at 1:54pm

    Ground Loop, thanks for the advice! I was wondering about the sudden lack of motor sound in the video, very glad to have a sensible explanation for it.

    And you're right that I should be trying to learn to control it and keep it nearby at a lower altitude. I think after two crashes on takeoff I acquired an irrational groundophobia. The sum total of my RC flying experience is that my brother handed me the controls of his fixed wing gas plane once or twice many years ago!

    I've been wanting to buy a magnetometer, but they were out of stock before. Now I see they're in so I'm putting one on order today. Makes sense that the GPS hold behaves poorly without one, especially since it was fairly windy that day.

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