Tag: FrSky

As you might have realized, from time to time I'm making an antenna and I have the equipment for it. I'm also strongly considering to produce a small batch of antennas for FrSky R9 long-range radio system since there is a high demand for such antennas.

I have made a first small series or FrSky R9M dipoles tuned for the 868MHz EU-LBT version of this radio link and I want to give away 3 of them to my Patrons. If you want one of the 3 antennas:

1. go to https://www.patreon.com/pawelspychalski and become my patron if you are not one yet
2. go to Custom FrSky R9M antenna giveaway post and comment with "I want one"
3. wait one week until 5th of September 2018

On that day I will randomly choose three commenters and send them brand new, custom made 868MHz FrSky R9M antenna.

FCC 915MHz version giveaway will follow, I'm waiting for parts to arrive in a few weeks.

My 3D printed racing drone is done. More or less. I was able to finish it a few weeks ago and even perform a maiden flight. It survived the experience, but I also discovered few problems I will have to solve before officially calling this project a success.

First of all, the decision about hard mounting a flight controller and not installing a capacitor on mains was a bad one. Not only motors are "twitching" from time to time, a video is very noisy. I hope big low ESR capacitor will solve that, since there is no way for soft mounting for this frame.

Besides that, it worked just fine. I will try to prepare a video from the maiden flight in a few day, for now only a few pictures and final specification:

• Frame: PLA 3D Printed, 220mm motor-to-motor diagonal
• Motors: EMAX RS2205S 2300KV
• ESC: Racestar RS30A BLHeli_S
• Flight controller: FrSky XSRF3O running Betaflight 3.2
• VTX: TS5823 200mW
• Camera: RunCam Swift
• Total weight, no battery: 380g

Total build is, of course, heavy, but not that heavy as I feared. I was expecting something way above 400g. The frame is also quite stiff. I wonder how much beating it will be able to take….

So, you want to build your own RC radio system? Long range maybe? Cool, I want to do it too. Since I'm pretty deep in that topic now, I can give you a hint or two. For example, have you thought about a protocol your radio system will implement?

Or rather should I say: protocols? Why plural? If you want to do a RC link that talks with popular radios like FrSky Taranis on TX side and servos or flight controllers on the RX side, it will have to implement at least 2 different protocols. More likely 3. And if you will want to add telemetry downlink, 4 or even 5…

Continue reading DIY RC radio link: the problem of protocols

Since I just started to add support for "old" FrSky XSRF3O flight controller to INAV (expect this in a release after 1.8) it might be a good idea to share few words about it.

First of all, it comes in a box. Why am I mentioning this? Because none of my flight controllers, and I own at least more than a dozen, came in box. C'mon, this is huge! I'm not joking, this is really a nice touch.

Continue reading Hands on: FrSky XSRF3O flight controller

Did you noticed that lately I write about radios quite often? Well, I do and it's not a coincidence. Proper introduction for what I'm working on will happen in a next few days, but now I will only write that this will be a mid-range, cheap, DIY radio link for UAVs. By mid-range I mean up to 5km. So, it will be positioned somewhere between 2.4GHz systems and full sale LRSes like DragonLink or TBS Crossfire.

Back to business. I've discovered, that there is very little in The Internet how to generate S.Bus with Arduino. OK, there are few libraries for reading Futaba S.Bus protocol like mikeshub/FUTABA_SBUS or zendes/SBUS but the only library made simple I've found is bolderflight/SBUS. Too bad it works only with Teensy devices. So, after a few hours of hard work, reading code of OpenTX, MultiWii, INAV, reading RcGroups and final help of Konstantin Sharlaimov (Digital Entity of INAV), I give you:

Generate S.Bus packets with Arduino in a simple way

But first, few simple facts:

Continue reading Generate S.Bus with Arduino in a simple way

I have a nasty habit of buying things and then forgetting about them. Something like that happened to Tiny Frsky 8CH Receiver (Wolfbox F802 software compatible) from Banggood I’ve purchased last year. For some time I used it in JJPro P175 quadcopter, but then it landed in a box and I forgot about until last week.

So, let’s do overdue “hands on” on Tiny Frsky 8CH Receiver from Banggood… Continue reading Hands on: Tiny Frsky 8CH Receiver from Banggood

STM32F7 CPU family present in newest, experimental, flight controllers like AnyFC F7 (as well as upcoming AnyFC M7 with smaller STM32F722) simplifies many things. For example, comparing to F4 boards, SmartPort or S.Bus connection is extremely simple and can be done on any free UART. No more hardware hacks, external inverters and other “special” ways of doing things.

It’s super simple again, and here is how to do it in Betaflight (Cleanflight 2.x) and INAV

Hardware

The only required hardware is a cable to connect SmartPort enabled receiver with free UART port on F7 board. This will work on X8R, X6R, X4R, X4RSB, XSR and any other. The trick is to connect S.Port pin with UART TX pin only.

Continue reading FrSky SmartPort Telemetry on AnyFC F7

Miniquads are fun, right? After all, there is a reasons most uf us flies 210-250 quadcopters. If so, small flying wings should be fun too! I tried that already in late 2015 and failed miserably! My design did not survived maiden flight. Well, things like that happens from time to time, so few months ago, after learning few new things, I’ve made a second attempt. And this time I’ve succeeded.

Continue reading Mini Flying Wing: MiniWing v2

This post is only a short update for SmartPort inverter for F4 flight controllers. Here is alternative SmartPort inverter circuit using bipolar BC547 instead of unipolar 2N7000. All other aspects of operations are the same like in MOSFET version.