T3 season two, the multirotor one.

Hello,

I haven't entered one of these since T3 R4 so I thought I'd give it a shot with my AQ6 Hexa. The writing was on the wall that multirotors for LOS work were much more practical so my Attopilot has hung quietly in my garage for quite a while.

I did a practice flight near my house with a few seconds at each corner and then I went out and did 3 missions on Mar 26th at my RC flying field Falcon R/C in Lake Dallas,TX. The first was 15 mins and it flew well. I increased the WP times for a 30 minute flight and it went well also. The next attempt was for 45 minutes with at least 3 minutes in each corner but I didn't quite have enough battery. Looked like 41 to 42 minutes would be about it. I went out again on the 5th of April and got a good 42 minute flight. A total of 23 waypoints were used to get each corner and to turn to a heading which faced to the inside of the box.The minimum time at any corner was 196 seconds with many corners having 294 second waits. Any AQ should be able to fly a correctly programmed mission so hopefully bonus points for time will make the difference in winning with the added risk that it has more time to wander around.

The fact that most of us use barometric sensor's for altitude hold the KML plots of GPS altitude don't really represent what the copter is trying to achieve. In long duration flights the barometric pressure change can easily cause several meter difference between baro altitude and gps altitude. I've included a link to my KML plots for my 15, 30 and 42 minute flights showing both GPS and Baro altitude plots to better represent what the copter did vertically.

My copter is a one of a kind using a few of Rusty's plates, 16mm aluminum tubes and my own motor mounts and landing gear. I removed my gimbal and fpv stuff to reduce weight. The motors are inexpensive RCTimer 5010 motors with 15 x 5 carbon props AUW 2.8kg. I parallel 2 6000mah 4 cell Nano Tech battery's for power with a AQ6 FC and 6 ESC32 speed controls. I got hooked on the AQ5 from Bill Nesbitt's post in DIY a couple of years ago, and have built from scratch 1 AQ5 and 4 AQ6 boards and lots of ESC32's.

I wanted the mission to be fully autonomous so I did a mini mission to find out where my TO position was on the RC field. I let it land on that position and then went out and marked the spot. That allowed the TO and LND lines to be the same path. On each flight I programmed the mission and carried it to the TO point and put it in mission mode. The logging of the flight was on the internal microSD card that log's 200 times a second just about everything. A conversion program creates the KML file.

Here are links to a video describing the longest flight.

I didn't see how to attach a file so here is a link to the AQ KML files and JPG's for 3 flights. Thanks for keeping the contest going Gary but more entry's would probably be entered if an objective posted scoring method was used.

Thanks Again

Steve

re's a link to a small video describing the 42 minute Flight.

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Comments

Norbert Machinek April 12, 2013 at 10:51am

The T3S2 challenge looked like it was made for the AutoQuad. ;-)

There will be another entry soon with similar results, so the judges will have a hard time to select the "neatest" cube.
At least it shows that Steve's flight wasn't just a lucky punch but repeatable results with different airframes and setups.

Norbert
T3

Richard Boyhan April 12, 2013 at 9:15am

Wow, that's amazing. In the famous humble words of Wayne's World ... We're not worthy, we're not worthy. LOL. Way to go Steve.
Rob_Lefebvre April 12, 2013 at 7:56am

Wow. Well, I might as well hang up my hat. No point risking my new heli so early, I can't beat that. That's insanely good. That's unbelievable duration for only 2 6000mAh batteries.

I might do a quick cube flight just to say I did but don't think I'll try such a long auto mission with it yet.
Moderator

Ruwan April 12, 2013 at 6:41am

Great work Steve! Would it be possible to share your configuration at http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/share-your-drone-info-thread ?

Thank you.
Moderator

Gary Mortimer April 12, 2013 at 6:23am

Wow, top notch. Longest in each corner and a complete cube seemed the fairest from the outset to me.
T3

Steve Westerfeld April 12, 2013 at 6:16am

Hello,

I haven't entered one of these since T3 R4 so I thought I'd give it a shot with my AQ6 Hexa. The writing was on the wall that multirotors for LOS work were much more practical so my Attopilot has hung quietly in my garage for quite a while.

I did a practice flight near my house with a few seconds at each corner and then I went out and did 3 missions on Mar 26th at my RC flying field Falcon R/C in Lake Dallas,TX. The first was 15 mins and it flew well. I increased the WP times for a 30 minute flight and it went well also. The next attempt was for 45 minutes with at least 3 minutes in each corner but I didn't quite have enough battery. Looked like 41 to 42 minutes would be about it. I went out again on the 5th of April and got a good 42 minute flight. A total of 23 waypoints were used to get each corner and to turn to a heading which faced to the inside of the box.The minimum time at any corner was 196 seconds with many corners having 294 second waits. Any AQ should be able to fly a correctly programmed mission so hopefully bonus points for time will make the difference in winning with the added risk that it has more time to wander around.

The fact that most of us use barometric sensor's for altitude hold the KML plots of GPS altitude don't really represent what the copter is trying to achieve. In long duration flights the barometric pressure change can easily cause several meter difference between baro altitude and gps altitude. I've included a link to my KML plots for my 15, 30 and 42 minute flights showing both GPS and Baro altitude plots to better represent what the copter did vertically.

My copter is a one of a kind using a few of Rusty's plates, 16mm aluminum tubes and my own motor mounts and landing gear. I removed my gimbal and fpv stuff to reduce weight. The motors are inexpensive RCTimer 5010 motors with 15 x 5 carbon props AUW 2.8kg. I parallel 2 6000mah 4 cell Nano Tech battery's for power with a AQ6 FC and 6 ESC32 speed controls. I got hooked on the AQ5 from Bill Nesbitt's post in DIY a couple of years ago, and have built from scratch 1 AQ5 and 4 AQ6 boards and lots of ESC32's.

I wanted the mission to be fully autonomous so I did a mini mission to find out where my TO position was on the RC field. I let it land on that position and then went out and marked the spot. That allowed the TO and LND lines to be the same path. On each flight I programmed the mission and carried it to the TO point and put it in mission mode. The logging of the flight was on the internal microSD card that log's 200 times a second just about everything. A conversion program creates the KML file.

Here are links to a video describing the longest flight.

I didn't see how to attach a file so here is a link to the AQ KML files and JPG's for 3 flights. Thanks for keeping the contest going Gary but more entry's would probably be entered if an objective posted scoring method was used.

Thanks Again

Steve

re's a link to a small video describing the 42 minute Flight.
Moderator

David Anders April 10, 2013 at 6:06am

Hopefully there is a still day here this weekend and a break in the rain. I'm still trying to get my entry in!
Developer

Randy April 9, 2013 at 10:06pm

That's a very rough video of my entry in case you need video evidence.
Developer

Randy April 9, 2013 at 8:20pm

Ah, yes...i almost forgot about your marathon performance..
Rob_Lefebvre April 9, 2013 at 7:31pm

Richard, yeah, it was fun. To be frank, sometimes just flying around gets boring. It was fun pushing myself, and the system, on this one.

Gah, just spent 2 hours hooking up the remote mag on my heli. :(

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