Santa gave me an Estes Syncro (nano) yesterday, if the dog would stop barking I'd keep flying it... but so far its a ball for an absurdly small indoor flyer.

 

Rebuilt my quad on a new frame.
Tarot FY650 picked up on Amazon for $100.



Super boring video alert


First time flying in a long while and the first time flying with a gopro, so I was not super confident. The camera was wrecking the weight distribution and I was getting all sorts of weird behavior, most notably that it was yawing when using the roll stick. I need to figure out a way to mount the battery hanging out on the back to balance it out.

Just based on first impressions from assembly I would say this is a badass frame. Super rigid and folds up pretty tight. Just feels high quality in general.
Im hopinh to eventually get it running some bigger props and higher cell count.

 

If you are getting yaw while rolling then check your motor mounts. All motors must be as close to vertical as possible or they will fight eachother and ruin the handling as well as efficiency. I use a small bubble-level.

 

That could be it.
Do you put the level on the motor mount after leveling the frame? I basically just tried to eye-ball it and make sure the mounts were level with the center frame hub surface.

 

Yeah definitely use a level to match all the motors with the main frame plate. Eyeballing works ok on smaller quads but once the props get this big it needs to be as close to perfect as possible.

 

New Video


and some old video for the lolz:

 

So is there a good forum to join other than rcgroups.com? My wife just gave me a UDI U818A as an early birthday surprise and I'm starting to geek out about quad stuff.

 

You guys ever heard of Lily?

This New Drone Camera That Follows You Is Going To Change The Selfie Game Forever | Gimo

 

Tarot 680 rig didn't crash!


Good to know after sitting on it for like 6mths that the prebuilt/used rig i bought wasn't a mistake.

 

just got my first, a hubsan h107l, tiny indoor thing. it is so addicting. ive already burned a motor out and destroyed a set of blades learning to fly lol.

 

just got my first, a hubsan h107l, tiny indoor thing. it is so addicting. ive already burned a motor out and destroyed a set of blades learning to fly lol.

 

Ok, who's playing with 3DR Tower/DroidPlanner 3?

I need some brains to pick. I got all my **** reassembled last night and its time to start playing with autonomous stuff

 

Yeah, that.


I've been trash talking sticking a gimbal and a GoPro on mine for months. I with my vehicles would stop falling apart so I can spend time on fun stuff :(

 

Due to work I have carte blanche on 35,000 acres of perfectly flat and amazingly boring ag land (provided nothing is currently growing on it) to fly over. I've got a lot of space to play with the autonomous stuff, but its all on my dime and personal time. I'd love to get paid to do this, but someone more senior in our group is running our in house "drone" project, apparently I'm just a hobbyist.

Anyway, last night I got Tower running on my Nexus 7 and communicating with my APM 2.6 rig via a set of 915MHz telemetry radios. If I get off at 3 today I may go out to one of our quarry sites and see if I can get this working.

The big hassle I'm seeing is the amount of gear you need to make this work. Not only do I need a traditional RC TX, I also need an android device and a laptop. Tower will let you build the autonomous stuff in the field, but you still need a laptop running Mission Planner or APM Planner2 to define a lot of the parameters that are baked into the system. Critical stuff like failsafes and the Fence function need to be setup before hand. Maybe I'm missing something.

 

Ok guys, help me pick a reliable brushless gimbal controller (that isn't super expensive) which I can use to run a setup on my Tarot 680pro. The servo based one is basically useless unless it is a wind free day.

 

Hit up banggood and see if anything has decent reviews on RCG? I've been eyeing this one: Tarot T-2D V2 Brushless Camera Gimbal ZYX22 Gyro TL68A00 For GoPro3 - US$102.99 IDK if its worth a damn, but there you are.

 

Went with Walkera G-2d through amazon prime... 2 day shipping and easy returns means I can get it quickly to test out. Will report back.

 

Worked perfectly out the box.

Who wants my carbon fiber brushless setup with BruGui controller setup. IPower motors. I gave up on getting it dialed in

Also have an rctimer aluminum gimbal/motor setup... And an entire extra gimbal frame.

So yup... gimbals for sale. One controller that may be bricked (in the static bag) from bad firmware attempt.
2 Brushless, 1 servo based and then extra bits and pieces.
https://goo.gl/photos/F7QmqeH2S52XMAqf9
https://goo.gl/photos/QDYHibGQjiLMtBqd7
https://goo.gl/photos/LkGDqHgbfJzk8K6n9
https://goo.gl/photos/xZ79JJpGeVCh2UoeA
https://goo.gl/photos/z61SPejiWqKy79NU8
https://goo.gl/photos/VKvKWyQ9bY3SLVUW7

 

Ok, who has experience with the Pixhawk flight controller hardware?

Some of them can be purchased cheap:
Banggood - $84.90
Goodluckbuy - $86.80
Readytoflyquads - $95.00

And of course the "good one" at 3DRobotics - $199.99

Unfortunately the 3.3 ArduCopter firmware no longer fits on my APM 2.6 so I'm stuck with AC3.2.x. This does not sound like a big deal until you realize they pulled support for I2C sonar out of 3.2 (actually, I think they pulled it as far back as 3.0? having a hard time confirming) and I really REALLY want to play with one of these bad boys:


SF10/A (25 m) - LightWare Optoelectronics (Pty) Ltd

Now I could roll back to an older firmware but I'm not 100% sure what version I would need and I don't want to troubleshoot old stuff that no one is using anymore.

I like Mission Planner/APMPlanner and thus the desire to stick with AC compatible hardware. I'm not smart enough to deal with any of the other open source projects that require a command line.

Thoughts?

 

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