Saturday, February 21, 2015

Test Flight Successful

Finished the basic build of the quad and was able to get a quick successful test flight in the basement after about 5 hours of messing around with the quad, my radio, and Mission Planner.

Finally worked out all the little issues and had a successful test flight:

  1. The Deadcat needed to be balanced as it was naturally nose heavy.  Moving the battery allowed me to balance the quad.
  2. I played around with ESC calibration and radio settings for hours because the props kept spinning when I armed the quad.  My old APM equipped quad did not do this.  Well it turns out that the default for Mission Planner with Pixhawk is to make the blades spin slowly when armed.  I did manage to program the ESCs to play tunes when they power on, but that is not much use.
  3. Turning on the throttle failsafe is a waste of time as it is triggered as soon as you arm the quad, causing the arm function to fail.
  4. Use loctite on all bolts, the one place that where it was skipped (landing skids), a bolt came loose.
  5. Need to make up a cheat sheet with the meaning of all Pixhawk and ESC sounds and lights.  It is hard to understand failures otherwise.
  6. Had to reverse all the RC channels except throttle.
  7. It seems smoother than the last quad as the props are balanced but it is more twitchy on the controls, so will have to do some more tuning.

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