Today was a very productive day for the quadcopter. I had already converted the 4000mAh beast to a Deans setup, so I had to get all of the ESCs and Arduino power cables to join the battery in parallel. I bought a very cool 1 male to 2 female Deans parallel connector at the hobby shop, so I decided one side of that would wire two ESCs, while the other would take care of the remaining two ESCs and the Arduino. I’m not very good at joining wires mid-air, but it worked out alright.
I am thrilled to have that done. I then moved onto debugging the sensor data. Paul René on the RC Groups forum shared some excellent code for visualizing the sensor data. The post can be viewed here. I tweaked it a bit because I’m not using a 12-bit A/D like he is. I had to mess with the line:
midAccZ-=300;
and change it to:
midAccZ-=100;
…in order for me to get proper angles. Full disclosure: I used no scientific method to get that number. I just tweaked it until holding the ‘copter at a right angle produced an angle of approximately 90 degrees. It may be different for other quads.
I took it a step further and modified the code to incorporate the IDG300 for detecting yaw. I mainly wanted to see if it was working. It’s the blue line in the middle in the screenshots below. The data may not look like much if you can’t see me moving the Arduino around in the air, but trust me that it’s awesome.
I placed an order for a Mode 2 Spektrum DX5e as well. I accidentally bought Mode 1 the first time around (I had no idea there was a difference) and I happened to break the receiver two days ago. The receiver alone is $60, so I just shelled out another $40 to get the proper mode transmitter and free shipping. I guess you could say I’m learning a lot…