Success! Taking video from the quadcopter is about three weeks premature, but I couldn’t resist. I definitely should’ve waited for a roll-cage over the electronics, and this is made apparent by the fact that my front motor isn’t working after a few crashes today. I wanted to take some aerial shots of Lake Osceola on [...]
I presented my quadcopter work at the Research and Creativity Forum yesterday. It was a great time. A couple of my professors stopped by and the judges seemed very impressed. It’s always good to get some motivation to continue working on this. The poster that I had at the event is linked in PDF format [...]
So I didn’t want to throw down several hundred dollars for a TxRx combo, so I went with the $99 solution. The Spektrum DX5e is a five channel, full range transmitter that comes bundled with the AR500 receiver. Since I am reading the PWM in parallel and not the PPM, I needed to determine the [...]
Haha, it flies! I had no idea what to expect for the first series of flight…at least nothing broke. Here is one of the indoor tests. I had the stability turned off for the yaw axis, and that’s why it spins around in the air like that. It’s kind of cool to see how necessary [...]
The replacement AR500 receiver came in the mail the other day. I managed to power it up without killing it like last time. I got a brand new transmitter too because the first one was the wrong mode. Mode 2 has the throttle on the left stick (which is standard in the US), and what [...]
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 [...]
This may be obvious to those who have experience with RC stuff, but I figured I would share my experience anyways because I think a couple of people on the forum face the same challenge. The problem with the most popular battery mentioned on the forum (Zippy Lightmax 4000mAh) is that it has bullet plugs [...]
So everything was coming along just fine until I just broke the AR500 receiver. I was being a noob and was probing 5 Volts around the pins as if it was no big deal. The LED stopped flickering (which is always bad) and when I touched the receiver, it was extraordinarily hot. I’m pretty sure [...]
This was one of those things that needed to be done, but just difficult to get around to. It actually turned out to be much more interesting that I expected. Here’s the problem: the EPP1045 propellers had a hole that was too small in the center. We needed to bore a wider hole so that [...]
The 5DOF unit from Sparkfun came in the mail today. Also, the Rx Tx José and I ordered came a couple of days ago. Below are some pictures. Click on any to enlarge. The quarter is just so you can get a sense of scale. I just soldered some headers to the sensors so soon [...]