What are Motor Stop and Airmode features in INAV and how they differ from each other when used on multirotors and fixed-wing airplnes? Should you use Motor Stop on multirotor? Should you use Airmode on a fixed wing? Long story short:
What to do when Matek F722-STD flight controller is not booting without connected battery and connection from Configurator is not working? Simple, power GPS and magnetometer from a different pad.
All 5V pads are powered only when external power is supplied to the flight controller. Not when power is applied via USB cable. If you connected GPS and magnetometer to 5V pad, it will not work and screw I2C bus up. To solve this problem, connect GPS to 4V5 pad instead!
Think about an electric motor for your 5 (or maybe even 6) inch acro or FPV racing quadcopter. What do you see? Something in a 2205-2306 size range with a KV rating somewhere 2300KV and 2600KV. Sometimes even more. And it works great, as long as you wat 5-inch props and 4S batteries. You can choose and choose and choose between different models of different manufacturers. But what if you want to go 6S or 7 inches? You have a problem. Very limited choice of motors (and propellers as well).
Luckily, it starts to change and you can actually but lower KV 220x and 230x motors. I got my hands on EMAX RS2 2206 1600KV since I'm not very happy with TBS Endurance I'm using on my 7-inch endurance drone. They seem to be missing some torque and when I've found that new low-KV (1600KV is still a lot) EMAX motors, I did not waited long to order. I love RS2205S and RS2306 and hope RS2 will not disappoint me.
What can I say about EMAX RS2 2206 1600KV before installing them on anything? (so far I got only 2, the second pair is on a way)
How will EMAX RS2 2206 1600KV behave in the air driving 7-inch propellers? work? Good, I hope…
FrSky is not making things simple with R9 long range system. New firmware appears quite often and there is no way to flash receivers over the air. You can use some PC software, passthrough from FC and things like that, but from my perspective, as long as you can get to the receiver itself, the simplest way to flash R9 Slim and R9 Mini is to actually connect them to Taranis or Horus and do it from the radio itself. How? Like this!
7-inch endurance FPV drone is my new thing. There is one little problem tho: good 7-inch low pitch efficient propellers. The choice is that there is almost no choice at all! The list of 7-inch propellers with a pitch or around 4" and preferably 2 bladed (efficiency) is as follows:
And I already know that some those above are total crap!
In the last two weeks, I had plenty of time to sit in front of Fusion 360 to design a few things, but no time to 3D print anything. As a result, I have a couple of almost ready projects. Yesterday I showed you 3D Printed Dualcopter Reloaded. Today I will show you 3D printed tricopter drone. Tomorrow? Who knows…
Last year I have designed and made a fully printable quadcopter frame called Isando. It was fun, but well… There are plenty quadcopter frames over there. Cheap and much stronger than anyone can print at home. But Tricopters? Good luck with that.
I've taken some of the parts of Isando Quadcopter frame, designed some more and here it is.
The most important part of any tricopter is, of course, the tail motor tilting mechanism. I had the following options:
Guess which option I've chosen? Right… The tail will be quite heavy, so to somehow help with that, the rear motor has enough space to use 5-inch or 6-inch propeller. And the rest? The rest is quite standard:
Of course, I will share STL files but only after I will print and assemble this thing. So please wait a little longer.
Let's get our hand dirty and fix an old power bank. I got this thing a few years ago but recently it died. Li-Ion 18650 cells inside just died and now it even can not do a full charge of a smartphone.
What we will do over here:
The first generation of my 3D Printed Dualcopter was not the best. It was flying. Somehow. Poorly. Crashed. But for a moment it was flying alright.
I'm slowly designing the second generation of Dualcopter. This time smaller in scale since instead of 10-inch propellers, it will be using 5-inch ones. And smaller 2205 motors. And some carbon fiber to support 3D printed elements and hopefully give it a little more structural strength.
The general idea is as follows:
And that is more or less all… Will it work better than the previous one? I hope so 🙂
I like my 7-inch endurance quadcopter. It might not be the fastest one. Or the smoothest one. But it gives quite a lot of fun when just cruising with interesting views. And, since the battery lasts for more than 10 minutes, you can have this fun for a long, long time
I have something like a personal problem with "the best FPV transmitter manufacturer". It's about ideology. So, when a few weeks ago I had to order a few 5.8GHz transmitters, I had something like a problem. With TBS Unify Pro on my "not wanted" list, the "wanted" list got somehow short.
I do own a few Matek HV VTXes and I'm quite happy with them. But I can not always buy the same thing, so when I saw Eachine TX805 for slightly more than $15 I've decided to give it a try.
It appeared in the mail today and here are some first thoughts about it.
First of all, it's slightly bigger than I expected and in fact, it almost looks like a clone of Matek HV VTX. Not that it's bad or something, it's just not what I expected.
RF circuitry is shielded. And that is good. I only wonder if there is any kind of thermo-pad between shielding and RF components. I hope since at 800mW heat can kill electronics pretty easy. I like MMCX connector since u.fl sucks so much. I also like the fact that all the connectors are solderable. I prefer that over JSTish connectors. A pretty bulky choke allows me to suspect that built-in 5V voltage stabilizer of the camera is at least decent as well. On the other hand, soldering on MMCX does not look "high quality". But hey, I got it for $15.99, I can not expect too much, right?
What else in a box? RP-SMA pigtail, whip antenna, and a short manual. It's a nice touch about that manual. It's quite nice and written in understandable English language!
Eachine TX805 5.8GHz 40CH 800mW video transmitter specification:
I got mine Eachine TX805 from Banggood
Do you know that there is a YouTube channel with awesome, drone and FPV related video? Why don't you give it a try?
