Hi all,
i wanted to write down the journey i did over the past few years after a friend pointed me to diydrones.com.
I was quickly hooked by the hobby virus after assembling, flying and crashing my first rc-plane and afterwards fiddling around to get a APM1 integrated into a Bixler.
Since i live in a dense populated city i thought i should start with doing autonomous missions on the ground and so was pretty enthusiastic about the released rover code from Jean Louis Naudin in 2012.
I bought me a rc car from Hobbyking, strapped a APM1 on to it and it was great fun right from the beginning.
When i got involved with the rover community i teamed up with Tom and Tridge and we did a huge amount of tinkering, coding and testing in the following years.
I could get little deeper insights how things are working and Tom was able to win the 2013 AVC with his vehicle (Peloton class) which was a quite satisfying outcome i think.
I then bought me a few more components, a quad frame and started further explorations at the flying field.
Over the years i flew MultiWii, Megapirate, Harakiri, Baseflight and other available firmware/hardware combinations.
I did build a few big camera ships (Hexas, Octos) as well, mostly equipped with DJI and ZeroUAV autopilots.
But to be honest i am always missing the features and functionality ArduCopter/ArduPlane and APMrover2 comes with.
I will stick with Pixhawk in the future whenever its possible.
Today i can proudly report from the first big feature filming job with a X8 Octo equipped with a Red epic cinema camera beneath :) A rig worth 50.000 $. It was a long exhausting but very satisfying day.
So i think its time for a few nice words to all the developers and all other people involved.
This achievement wouldnt be possible without your work, the time you spend with the project and i am thankful for every single line you wrote over the years!
Im really looking forward to spend more time with pixhawk / linux autopilots and the community.
In deep gratitude for your time and efforts helping me to reach my very personal moon landing :)
Cheers
Linus
Comments
Hi Linus, Darrell,
You may know I am a real advocate of quadcopters big and little, but there are some issues with big quadcopters related to scaling up.
It is certainly true that the bigger motors and bigger props are quite a lot more efficient than more smaller ones.
You definitely can get more flight time per battery for any given size and weight.
But the flight and response characteristics of really large quadcopters can be sub-optimal under some circumstances.
The large slow turning props can actually produce asymmetric flight characteristics depending on their positions relative to each other, causing under various load and acceleration conditions unexpected wobble or vibration at a fairly low frequency but relatively high amplitude.
This is often especially noticeable when accelerating or stopping a descent.
It is also an effect that can manifest itself when the copter is compensating for gusts or it's own automatic or manual flight maneuvers.
In a copter such as Linus's X8 this phenomenon is much less if at all present due to the higher speed and multiplicity of propellers.
What vibration/wobble effect there is is also higher frequency and lower amplitude meaning it is easier to compensate for in the gimbal mount and by the gimbal motors.
It may or may not be a serious problem, but it is definitely something you should be aware of and has affected been noted by many of the long endurance large quadcopter flights.
And I am sure it could be really irritating for HD or Ultra HD pro video in particular.
Best regards,
Gary
Hi,
i guess i should go slowly, build a heavy lift quad next and see what happens.
I am tempted to give it a try with an APM laying around but should probably order a Pixhawk for this purpose.
Hoping 3DR will soon deliver a nice package that fills the gap for our heavy lift needs.
Maybe with Pixhawk 2, PX4 ESCs, Optical flow and Lidar-lite sensor were able to get there :)
Cheers
Linus
@Linus - Thanks for sharing, sounds like a wonderful journey. I too would love to see Arducopter as the go to choice for larger copters as well. I spent a fair amount of time testing with my SkyJib about a year ago but had to move on after having quite a few issues. I think it's time to try again with newer versions of Arducopter on the Pixhawk looking quite good. If you make any progress in that area I'd love to hear about it.
@Linus,
A nice narrative and a great success story.
By all means please keep us informed as to your future plans and projects.
Regards,
Tom C AVD
Thanks Linus,
This is one of the things on my list, making arducopter the default choice for BIG camera rigs and payload carriers.
Good luck!!!
Thanks Gary!
the project involves flying these big camera ships for feature film, advertising productions and such.
For this particular project the production company kept everything pretty secret.
But what we did was flying take after take in two different locations all day long, waiting for clouds was probably the silliest thing i've ever done while flying :)
I could get that that we produced so called plates for the post production and that the final movie will have lots of robots :) i think the Red was recording 5K Video.
Frame is a Skyjib X8 with T-Motor U7, DJI A2. Gimbal is a freefly MoVI.
Not so much DIY but works very well.
Im pretty interested flying such vehicles with low kv motors, big props and Open Source stuff but lets see how things go.
thanks again for all the great work you and other wizards here have done with creating this great platform!
Cheers
Linus
Really happy that it has worked out so well for you Linus,
I am sure I speak for everyone when I say your help on DIYDrones has also been much appreciated.
Can you tell us more about what you are doing in your current project and provide more info on the copter?
Best Regards,
Gary