Blogs

OK, OK, technically this is the second  flight..  First flight is here: http://youtu.be/0yKjbtFW-u4  ; I just like the second video better.

The vertical instability was caused by me not having the throttle curve set right on the Transmitter; by default it is just a straight line from 0 to 100. Setting the throttle curve to something more curvy makes it much more stable up and down.

Took me a while to get back to this, mostly because I was waiting for a  replacement motor installed after a brief but terminal "magic smoke event".

Thought I also needed a new ESC, but found a post here (http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/one-esc-is-not-like-the-others) which set me straight.

Spent a bunch of time at the workbench running through things, including

• pretty much all of the RC inputs need to be reversed for me (JR790)
• you really do need to arm the motors before anything happens; it is amazing how much time you will spend trying to figure why nothing is going on (but see previous point as to why I may have been having difficulty.
• taping and wrapping connections, I'm toying with the idea of heat-shrinking the motor wires to the end of the arm:

Next steps:

• Wrap the remaining motor wires
• Replace nylon screws with metal ones 
• Add XBee modules to airframe
• lots and lots of flying

Anyway, that's enough for now -- I'm off to fly some more...