UAV Devboard Funjet

After spending the last year or so experimenting with the UAV devboard on my larger flying wings I decided to spice things up a bit. I had a funjet with a gopro mounted to the nose that I used for FPV. Last summer it took a nasty crash when I lost radio signal (2.4ghz) and smashed the nose up really well. Over the winter I rebuilt the nose (yes the entire front from the wings forward is custom foam work...there is more pics on my RCG build log) and decided I would let my quadcopter handle the gopro and switch the funjet over to my dedicated FPV platform.

Not wanting to lose it again I switch control over to 72mhz and installed a lighter camera freeing up enough space to also install the devboard. I've flown this both FPV and via the devboard and am extremely happy with how it turned out. The only thing I have yet to sort out is a notch filter for my video TX as the 900mhz system with my custom 1/2 wavelength antenna isn't playing nice with my GPS.

This time I took a great deal of time to situate the UDB almost exactly on the CG and also cut a bed/housing for it from soft vibration damping foam. In my last wing setup I could never get it to fly perfect, it always had a little wag but I only had to change my gain values 3 times on this platform to get a very smooth flying plane, this could also be due to the fact that its about 1/4 the weight and half the size as well ;).

Tonight I just upgrade the firmware to the latest 3.0 and will testing it shortly and post back with my findings and possibly the options.h file to help others looking for guidelines to go off (I know I was).

Thanks guys,

I tried loading in the new firmware last night but my compiler is failing on the linking step with the 3.0 firmware. I'll look more closely into that in the coming days but I did have another very successful flight with the older 2.5 firmware. I was running a simple square waypoint flight and had nice snappy turns at the corners. Even went ahead and gave inverted flight a test but will have to change the inverted pitch as its a little to excessive for the funjet, which flies quite well upside down.

Last weekend I gave it the trust test out in the country when I flew it to the limits of my vision. I toggled the autopilot to come home and watched the small speck in the sky slowly make its way back down to me. There were a few tense moments when I lost sight of the beast to check my timer but the UDB did what it should and after a few seconds of searching I found the plane happily circling 1000 feet overhead. Far to much fun!

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Curt Filipowski May 19, 2011 at 9:03am

Sorry for the lack of updates (and lack of options file), weather has been beautiful here and I've been spending my time flying and working on other projects and not posting. I spent a little more time working with my gain values and have a fairly stable setup now. I will include my options.h file this evening.
Curt Filipowski May 3, 2011 at 11:55am

Ahhhh,

Many thanks Bill! I will update MPLAB tonight and try again. Thanks for the tip, I probably would have spent a few hours banging my head against the wall before finding that out.

Thanks again!

Curt
T3

William Premerlani May 3, 2011 at 11:49am

Hi Curt,

MatrixPilot 3.0 was built using the latest version of the Microchip compiler (v3.25).

Microchip made some changes that will cause a linker error if you use newer MatrixPilot versions with older versions of the compiler. There are two options for fixing the linker error:

1. If you want to continue to use the older version of the compiler with MatrixPilot 3.0, go into the project build options, under the linker tab, and revert to default linker options. This will turn off the link options that are causing the problem.

or

2. Reinstall the compiler and MPLAB using the latest versions available from Microchip.

Best regards,
Bill
Curt Filipowski May 3, 2011 at 10:59am

Thanks guys,

I tried loading in the new firmware last night but my compiler is failing on the linking step with the 3.0 firmware. I'll look more closely into that in the coming days but I did have another very successful flight with the older 2.5 firmware. I was running a simple square waypoint flight and had nice snappy turns at the corners. Even went ahead and gave inverted flight a test but will have to change the inverted pitch as its a little to excessive for the funjet, which flies quite well upside down.

Last weekend I gave it the trust test out in the country when I flew it to the limits of my vision. I toggled the autopilot to come home and watched the small speck in the sky slowly make its way back down to me. There were a few tense moments when I lost sight of the beast to check my timer but the UDB did what it should and after a few seconds of searching I found the plane happily circling 1000 feet overhead. Far to much fun!
T3

William Premerlani May 3, 2011 at 4:15am

Hi Curt,

Thanks for sharing, and I think it would be a great idea to post your options.h file.

Best regards,

Bill

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