Posts in Category: Quadcopters
A new perspective – the world from above
5 years ago I built my first quadcopters. They flew, they were fast, they had video transmission – but what I didn’t manage with the little time I had was to built one that hovers perfectly still like the DJI drones did. Flow-sensors were pretty expensive and the cheap ESCs and motors in my small drones were probably not accurate enough anyway to allow stabilisation with a imple PID-controller running on an Atmega microcontroller. So after searching for a hand-luggage portable photography drone for years, in november 2019 the DJI mavic mini hit the market. Unfortunately that was during and not before my southeast-asia holiday so there was no rush to get it (and it was sold out anyway).
Long story short, I bought one in february, flew in Dortmund and took the drone to see waves in Costa Rica =) . Pics below ^^
Building a micro Quadcopter (130mm)
180mm was still quite big and the frame wasn’t really built for folding so I went down to 130mm. Here you can see a few pictures of my first built which I have since crashed and disassembled a few times :D. New parts are on their way so you can expect some new builds around the 130-180mm size in the next months.
Building a smaller quadcopter
After my first experiences with a QAV250, I wanted to build something smaller and possibly foldable. I found a nice QAV180 frame which might work and started anew. This time, I had a faulty motor with some broken isolation resulting in smoke during the setup and a broken ESC which sometimes failed to start the motor unless given full throttle. After initial tries and a switch to BLHeli ESCs, I added an FPV camera and had some test-flights but calibration turned out to be really hard with a constant drift. I later figured out that one of the sticks on my 9XR remote had an abnormality: While moving straight along the Y-axis, it still showed some value-change to the X-axis as well in the form of a bump to the side reaching to about +15% near the 50% y-axis-setting but sticking to 0% for 0 or 100%.
Building a quadcopter
Some years ago I decided to build a quadcopter (back when DJI Quadcopters were really expensive and before the spark or mavic existed). The original plan involved the idea to build the chassis and electronics by when I heard about the RC-store ‘hobbyking’ and saw the prices, I decided to order some parts for testing first and might add or replace electronics later on. I went with a turnigy 9Xr remote with swappable modules (FrSky for now) and a multiwii controller.