Work-in-progress

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, I 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. 😛

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. 🙂

My spare PDB didn’t come in, so I’m left with a drone that looks like this:

That white thing in the middle is my “good enough” PDB, but it doesn’t fit in my frame. So I can’t assemble it all.

We got to the point where we were confirming incoming signals, and confirming outgoing signals, but couldn’t get incoming signals to create outgoing signals. Which meant that something was going wrong in the flight controller. It turns out, that for Russ’ board at least, the wiring diagram was completely wrong. We re-wired it and got immediate success!

Russ started then to assemble his stuff for real, with lock-tight and everything, while I got my own parts configured enough that once that damn PDB comes in, I’ll be in the same place he is. Shipping from Asia…

Here’s a photo of Russ’s drone, before the top plate got put on. It was wicked fun to hand-fly this thing around the room, as it’s so close to being a flyable device!

With the wedding done (and the ring done), Russ and I can put more attention on building our drones. The weather may stop us from flying for a bit, but building is a lot of fun! (and occasionally frustrating)

My PDB came in, which was conveniently timed for when I had more time. And it fit, unlike the last one. Here’s a photo of the correct PDB, and coincidentally the incorrect one is that white board below it.

This is also a photo of the Magic Blue Smoke not being inside anymore. If you look carefully at the board, there are 2 black chips in the middle of it. The left chip has a hole in it. Why does it have a hole in it Craig? If you look at the right of the board, at the top is a section labelled “5V” and below that still on the edge is a section labelled “12V”. That “12V” is not for 12V of input. It is for 12V of output. Output. It turns out that if you put 12V into the output, that chip on the left sparks, and the Magic Blue Smoke escapes through a hole that’s just been created. No bueno.

There’s still lots to do, so while it’s silly that I have to order yet another board, it’s fine. The board will arrive in a couple weeks, and in the meantime I’ve soldering all of my parts to the wrong board (the white one), because it still works as a PDB, it’s just the wrong size. Russ, who has a working and correctly sized PDB, has screwed all of his parts onto his copter frame and has something that resembles a copter.

However, functionality wise they’re in the same place. We plugged the receiver in, plugged the battery in, bound the transmitter to the receiver and…nothing. We thought the little motors would spin up.

We assumed that something needed configuring in the flight controller (FC), so we plugged that in and started poking around. No luck. And in the meantime, Russ snapped the USB port off his FC, so now we needed to figure out how to use the bluetooth module with it. We have bluetooth modules, but I’d been waiting to figure them out. No longer…

We had some pizza and mucked about until it was time to put it all done.

I’m surprised that I’m not frustrated by my PDB exploding. I guess I’m just taking it in stride that electronics take time and patience, but it’s very unlike me. 😛 I remember building a computer with my Dad in the early 1990s for the first time, and the weeks of trying new things and playing until it finally turned on without beeping endlessly at us. This is no different, except that now we have the internet (we had internet then, but it wasn’t nearly as populated!).