It's been several month, since I started this project, and this project is not moving forward as I have hoped and anticipated, due to my lack of expertise and technical diffulties involved.
Diy Drones have a lot of talented people that they actively comment and exchange great ideas, and I like to share my frame design and I'm also hoping to hear from them technical advices on my project.
The object of this frame design is A: smooth transition from vertical take off to winged horizontal flying, that matches fixed wing aircraft type by utilizing detachable, adjustable pitch, foldable wing design. (To increase fly time, to cover larger area, to increase flying speed).
Object of this frame design B is to fly Quad in vertical orientation, so that Quad can fly in the tight area where conventional Quad or Heli can not go through, when wings are detached.
Object of design C is to incorporating Solar Cloth in winged area to charge batteries during thermal soaring, if that is possible in this wing design that still is on my to do list.
This Tamiya Gear Box is already built into carbon frame, and I have shorten that longer axle to be fit into carbon frame. and this gearbox rotate both props (one on each side axis of gearbox in 180 degree).
Servo control board and pot from Futaba S-148 was used, and control board gets too hot to drive this gear box, and I had to look for alternative. (Poloru motor controler that I will need to program).
Vertical flying orientation (visualize prop is facing up!), In order to control tilt rotors (two rotor on the top of picture rotate by single gear box as a pair, and two rotor on the bottom is rotated by another single gear box as a pair).
In order to make this possible, I need remote XYZ sensors (Accellometer, Gyros, Magnetometer) that can tilt with rotor. (trying to tilt APM or whole board in the center of picture is too complicated, so I'm looking into to use Sparkfun's SEN-10321 instead of using built-in XYZ sensors on IMU or Oilpan), which I don't know how).
That is my problem number 1, and I need suggestion or comment from the board members who knows how. Another challenge that I'm having is that "how to connect rotor tilt funtions to APM", so that pitch can be controled by APM (not by using mixer control of receiver by using Y connector off receiver).
SEN-10321 sensor board is small enough to be mounted on the bottom of tiltable motor base in the picture above.
I'm using NG code now, and planing to migrate to current code, when I know how to acomplish those two challenges.
Specs on this Quad are; Motor is turnigy Prop Drive NTM 35-36 hacker 1400 kv 875w, apc 12-6 electric prop, apc 9-6 electric pro, 80amp turnigy super brain, 4s 5000 lipoi, total weight without lipo is 5.6 pound, tested runtime as is with single 4s 5000 lipo is 16 to 18 minutes.
Above picture is detail of motor mount and two props attched on motor axle.
Picture above is a bottom of Quad center that have room for 3 4s 5000 lipo.
Picture above shows rotating white servo horn to be attached to future wing, and provide pivot functions to the wing.
Also, how do I respond to my blog comments?
Comments
I agree with Sebastian that it's not necessary to actually tilt the APM. The APM and magnetometer etc are all 3D so it knows it's orientation in all 3 dimensions. I think though that it's not as simple as switching from + to x configuration because you actually want to fly with all props pointing horizontally (like a plane) although obviously you're missing the wing.
I think there will be some significant changes required to the ACM or NG code to make it work.
I guess you've searched the web for people doing similar things? I saw one video, the guys set-up looked less like a quad and more like a box kite.
good luck!
mount APM in X-configuration, then you'll be able to just "switch" the sensors to use another direction, no need to physically tilt them
great project anyways