[UPDATE: I've now flown this a bit. A few tips, which I learned the hard way:
1) Don't connect the green wire (gain) to your Rx. That disables all the onboard buttons and the little pot. Better to set these manually when you've first starting. Later, once you've got it flying well, this may be something you want to control from Tx, but not at the start.
2) Make sure you check the little addendum (if you've got the old manual, like me) about how to set the ESC curve. Make sure the green wire is unplugged and the gain is at zero, then power on the quad when your Tx throttle is at high, then bring the throttle down.
3) CA glue all the fiddly little plastic retaining rings. They fall off all the time and you'll end up leaving bits of this quad on the field]
Now that we're getting into the quadcopter business, I thought I should get a better feel for the competition. First up, the new Gaui 330X quadcopter that we wrote about here. At $400 it's in the same price range as ArduCopter, but it doesn't come with a full autopilot. It's just an airframe, motors/ESC and a 3-axis gyro unit (no accelerometers, so it's not an IMU). No GPS or any ability to program it--it's just an RC quad, not a UAV.
They say you can upgrade it to GPS navigation someday, but there's no clue how.
It comes very nicely packed in an surprisingly small and stylish box:
That the gyro unit at left and the four ESCs.
Here are all the parts. Lots of bolting bits together.
When you're done, it's supposed to look like this:
If you want to upgrade to a bigger body (plywood and fiberglass), you can:
Comments
I have just bought one of these from a mate. I also have a full Ardupilot mega with oilpan shield etc in the mail. I was going to put it on a spare nitro trainer (FPV and GOPRO) that I have, but i think I might wack it on this first so i can do some quick tests at the park with a laptop. I agree with chris on the green gain wire. I setup with manual gains and set the ESC's without it connected. Flies nice and stable. Now however I have hooked the gain to a spare channel on my receiver (setup as an aeroplane) with the travel on that channel limited to -50% and about +65%. With a switch flipped one way, you get a low gain, the other way you get a gain of about 65 i reckon. I only fly it on 2s, as its too touchy on 3s with no payload. I have also limited the throttle channel to as low as I can go (and still get the ESC's to initialize) to reduce the climb that it has, because I feel that it climbs very quickly with even the smallest amount of throttle and when you reduce the throttle even slightly as it climbs too quickly, it tends to drop from the sky, and is hard to recover smoothly.
yeah that sounds a bit silly.
Very much a nearly there product in my opinion, Chris is right about the box being small. This next statement might seem extravagant, but when you are operating somewhere miles from hobby stores it would be very handy to have a couple of complete spares sat on the shelf for in case.
Photo Ship One have made a very simple camera mount.
Gaui 330X Quadcopter Aerial Video from PhotoShip One on Vimeo.
What you do is take the frame and put OpenPilot on it ;-)
Heres the control unit unboxed courtesy of RCG
I flew mine for 16 hours and 10 minutes before the dreaded ESC failure, luckily on the ground. I am waiting for my free replacement from the UK dealer that I bought the unit from.
It seems there is a pent up demand for cheap Quads, GAUI can't make enough.