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MONTEREY AERIALS

Posted by Jack Crossfire on July 9, 2010 at 3:50pm



Stuck to a measly 200ft because of lack of horizontal space.



Still got a glimpse of Monterey airport.









The main event was not knowing where North was, the resulting loss of control, & spending most of our laptop battery power troubleshooting the loss of control. Flight operations were eventually stopped by laptop battery exhaustion.

Had her go into uncontrolled flips again in manual mode but managed to regain control. If a motor gets too slow it'll stall & the ESC will shut down. Eventually it'll restart & hopefully facing up. The 12x6's are so close to their stall speed this happens all the time in manual mode.

FLAG FLYING AGAIN




















SUNNYVALE HELL

The run of flying was bound to end with SUNNYVALE HELL. Either an ESC is bad, the ESC's are designed to stall at a low RPM, or she was near too many C-130's & caught a virus, but this was another total loss. She started flipping for no reason at 255ft & hit the grass upside down with the engines cut off.




Last shot before impact



Last decent shot before impact.



Last decent shot.



Interesting radar dish.



Pulverized again. Another crash with pride brought to you by U. Know. Where..





Flight recordings showed these flips happening in both directions, the ESC's looked good under the microscope. Down to PWM going below limits & putting them into safe mode.

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Comments

  • Michael Evans July 17, 2010 at 12:40am
    i can see my work! :)
  • Greg Fletcher July 12, 2010 at 8:22pm
    If you stopped using ground based computing thru the air (how do those signals go thru space if there id no air ???) , you wouldn't have to worry about cooties from c130's. GCS is for control input, not thinking. You may be the peak of DIY control circuits, but watch out for the singularity.....
  • JOHN PIZZICARA July 10, 2010 at 11:57pm
    Hey Jack, maybe it was the control link that failsafed the ESC's during the EMP Susceptibility Test you gave it in the main beam of that radar, especially if you were using a 2.4 GHz rig!?!
  • Paul Marsh July 10, 2010 at 6:33am
    Hi Jack. Great photos. Maybe this is a given, but was the flight totally autonomous? I'd be interested in the details there.
    Thanks,
    Paul
  • JOHN PIZZICARA July 9, 2010 at 10:32pm
    BTW, N is towards the water and W is back towards Assilomar from your location!
  • JOHN PIZZICARA July 9, 2010 at 10:27pm
    Hi Jack, great shots of Lake El Estero and MRY rwy 10R & ATCT. I hope we were on the 28's at the time and you had a spotter, right? The flag flying is cool. I think your radar "dish" is Bay ASR-9 Terminal Radar. IMHO, Get beefier ESC's, they're cheap enuf on the direct HK sites (ABC!) I really thought your tri-clops was a hoax the last post, but it's obviously for real!.
  • Developer
    Mark Colwell July 9, 2010 at 5:58pm
    Jack, maybe the BEC is over loaded? Are regulator chips hot? I run a $20 Castle Creation 3AMP UBEC to power all 5v stuff, It is programmable for output voltage up to 12v.
    Wait I see one next to giant super cap, Well maybe add a bigger heat sink to FET arrays? Is ESC set for low voltage cut off for 4 cells but should be 3 cells?
  • bGatti July 9, 2010 at 4:30pm
    Awesome, I grew up in Monterey.
This reply was deleted.