Things moved quickly once our parts came in. I think that’s the story of this project — “hurry up and wait for parts”.
We both got functioning machines assembled and had to quit for the night. I then spent many hours researching software tuning, configuration, etc, because while I can’t wrap my head around volts and circuit diagrams as well as when I was in Physics 12, IĀ can understand computer software and command line stuff.
We had a minor blip where one of the calibration processes killed Russ’ ESCs, but we had 2 spares so he replaced them, re-calibrated and was all good. Then outside.
It was a cold, but clear day at Strathcona park.
We brought a camp table to put our laptops. Yeah, this hobby has laptops at the park. š
This is my little copter!
Our collection of broken propellers. We dramatically dropped our prop-killing frequency when we turned off the failsafe feature. This feature keeps your motors spinning when the copter loses radio. The idea being that if it loses radio while in the air, it can slowly float to the ground. However, in our case mostly we were shutting off our receivers after it had crashed into the tennis court fence, or the tennis court tennis net, or just the ground, and having the motors still spinning meant they were snapping off.
I had one super embarrassing moment when I lost control, and it started to come down, but then …I think it lost radio, and just fell out of the sky from 20 feet…about 8 feet from a local jogger. That could have been so much worse. >.<
That fall broke one of my copter arms, which we epoxied back together (but it isn’t perfect). I also chopped off an antenna because it was floating around, so now my receiver has only 1 antenna. (which doesn’t seem to be working great) And lastly, my receiver isn’t always turning on anymore. And we don’t quite know why.
It continues to be both an interesting, and a frustrating hobby. But at least it’s a hobby that gives a good amount of research. <3 researching things. š
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