Ad

Sunday, March 30, 2014

2nd quadcopter practically RTF...

Other than having the recently ordered flight control board (Multiwii SE) mounted and configured, everything else was completed today with the addition of the custom made landing gear:


Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Brushless gimbal almost complete



With the arrival of the Mobius action camera, which is a Full HD (1920x1080 @ 30 Hz) little animal (very nice video quality for the price), my aerial filming addition to my #1 quadcopter is almost complete. The only missing element is the gimbal controller board, which I have ordered through ebay, but my mistake (or not) the seller have sent the MPU6050 instead (which I had at the same time ordered from a different seller). Result: I have two MPU6050 gimbal sensors and no gimbal controller. As such a dispute is being solved, and the seller decided to (supposedly) ship me the controller board. Otherwise I will escalate to ebay, get refunded, and the seller downgraded (or banned, who knows..).

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Improved quadcopter - more "avionics" and increased run time

In the several weeks that followed a crash caused by an ESC failure, plenty of work have taken place (some of which documented here). Several things have been done since:
  • Replacement of the ESCs with a 30 Amp quad ESC;
  • Upgrade of the flight controller firmware;
  • Building and programming the PPM Sum encoder;
  • Building a BEC/filter with 12 V and 5 V outputs;
  • Adding landing gear;
  • Adding voltage and current sensor;
  • OSD firmware upgrade;
  • Change of LiPO battery from 11.1 V (3S) to 14.8 V (4S);

Monday, March 17, 2014

Induction Stove

Some days ago my father asked me to check if I could repair this single element induction stove. I disassembled the device to inspect its inner workings. I was a bit curious because I have never taken apart this kind of apparatus.


Monday, March 3, 2014

Smoke test after a lot of changes

It's always a stressful moment when after many changes something is put to the test. This was the case, taking into account that since the last flight there was a replacement of all ESCs, upgrade to Arducopter MPNG 3.0.1 R4, installation of PPM Sum module, addition of voltage and current measurement, and use of a higher system voltage (4S instead of 3S LiPo).


Sunday, March 2, 2014

Busy quadcopter setup weekend

With the arrival of some of the parts I have been waiting for, more work accumulated with the finishing of my 2nd quadcopter. The parts were the landing gear and the quadruple ESC: The landing gear arrived with all the necessary parts as expected, including the lower crossing bar and the foam rods. The bar and other rods are all made of carbon fiber. The 4 support rings (for attaching to the frame) all had a rubber ring which helps to further dampen the vibration to additional items such as a camera: