Thread: Quadcopter research, right area?

why not.

what are you looking to buy?

My mate has a TBS discovery pro.

They are great fun and perfect for getting epic Gopro footage, but when they go bad, it's a world of hurt.

It went AWOL a while back due to a dodgy G sensor. It thought it was on a backward lean, and sped itself up with plenty of forward pitch... flying itself straight into the ground at full noise. Sadly the Gopro lost its footage.

I have 2.

My outdoor toy - 600mm quad built from around $300 of Hobby King bits. That doesn't include the transmitter, but ebay have good second hand units come up all the time for about half of what a new one costs.


And this little cracker for around the house and to scare the cats with - it's sitting on my iPhone 5 for size reference.


Go get one, off the shelf or build it yourself. Buy spares like props, motor mounts, frame etc - you WILL break things before you get good at it.

Originally Posted by bacicat

- you WILL break things before you get good at it.

Yep - I'll vouch for that.

Martyn

i have a tbs discovery pro.

its sitting in the box, it arrived the day i broke my leg, so i have bad memories looking at it.

I have a QAV500 with Pixhawk flight controller, full FPV, OSD, Telemetry, Gopro on Gimbal and Dragon link. Oh and Arduino mini controlling my flashing LEDs.

And a Align 450pro with Beast FBL and several other bits and several foam planes one being a Multiplex Funjet with enough motor to hit 240km/h. But I am too scared to fly the Funjet until I get some practice up with a few park jets.

Happy Days

Originally Posted by bacicat

you WILL break things before you get good at it.

Depends on your Flight Controller and how you approach it. I could at least sports fly Collective pitch helicopters before I got the Quad. I could hover inverted and do flips and rolls.

I have found the Pixhawk absolutly amazing. I can fly it with my Android tablet. I tap "Take Off" on the screen and it takes off. I tap "Follow Me" set the altitude and radius, walk away and it follows my with the camera tilted to look at my location.

I can take off with the tablet, change to "Loiter" or "Position hold" and then get agressive as I like with the stick and providing I had enough height to start with, I can hammer around the sky. Let go of the stick in either of those modes and it will pitch in the opposite direction to pull it up, hover and hold position.

When the batterie gets flat, it will start beeping, ignore my stick inputs, fly up to 25m, return to where it took off from and land.

Providing you put the time into getting everything working before you fly, it would be a hard thing to crash and be just down to stupidity.

Having said that, I have done a stupid thing and crashed mine (well sort of) I was having trouble in getting a low enough HDOP for arming. Instead of moving my GPS to get a better location lock, I raised the HDOP threash hold for the arming. In most circumstances it was fine but if it was windy it would drift a bit on take off. I like to show off a bit how good it is flying by the tablet but the down side of that is, if something goes wrong, the time it takes to put down the tablet and pickup the controller to fly manually takes enough time that it's usually too late. So I thought I was far enought away from a large tree but when I hit take off, it drifted under a branch and flew up into the branch. It did a complete flip upside down and smashed around a bit in the air. Then it righted itself but it was already coming down hard, it only touched the ground then took off again and went into the perfect hover like it was meant to. The impact on the ground however was enough to break the landing gear (2 legs) on one side and my FPV camera from its mount. I was super impressed at how it recovered and so was the guy I was showing off to, enough that he is buying an Iris which is the pre made Quad with the Pixhawk Flight Controller.


Happy Days.

Originally Posted by joel0407

Depends on your Flight Controller and how you approach it. I could at least sports fly Collective pitch helicopters before I got the Quad. I could hover inverted and do flips and rolls.

I have found the Pixhawk absolutly amazing. I can fly it with my Android tablet. I tap "Take Off" on the screen and it takes off. I tap "Follow Me" set the altitude and radius, walk away and it follows my with the camera tilted to look at my location.

I can take off with the tablet, change to "Loiter" or "Position hold" and then get agressive as I like with the stick and providing I had enough height to start with, I can hammer around the sky. Let go of the stick in either of those modes and it will pitch in the opposite direction to pull it up, hover and hold position.

When the batterie gets flat, it will start beeping, ignore my stick inputs, fly up to 25m, return to where it took off from and land.

Providing you put the time into getting everything working before you fly, it would be a hard thing to crash and be just down to stupidity.

Having said that, I have done a stupid thing and crashed mine (well sort of) I was having trouble in getting a low enough HDOP for arming. Instead of moving my GPS to get a better location lock, I raised the HDOP threash hold for the arming. In most circumstances it was fine but if it was windy it would drift a bit on take off. I like to show off a bit how good it is flying by the tablet but the down side of that is, if something goes wrong, the time it takes to put down the tablet and pickup the controller to fly manually takes enough time that it's usually too late. So I thought I was far enought away from a large tree but when I hit take off, it drifted under a branch and flew up into the branch. It did a complete flip upside down and smashed around a bit in the air. Then it righted itself but it was already coming down hard, it only touched the ground then took off again and went into the perfect hover like it was meant to. The impact on the ground however was enough to break the landing gear (2 legs) on one side and my FPV camera from its mount. I was super impressed at how it recovered and so was the guy I was showing off to, enough that he is buying an Iris which is the pre made Quad with the Pixhawk Flight Controller.


Happy Days.

Yeah, if your cheating using GPS then you can keep it in one piece.