Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Quadcopter - X450 Carbon Fiber frame

Hello!
I got an X450 Carbon Fiber frame and installed all of my parts on to it to test with. It flew fairly well. I have made a video of the flight and it can be found here: Quadrocopter - X450 CF XQuad - Outdoor - First flights

I have also assembled the plexiglass DJC1000-X4 'beta' frame and I flew it late tonight with some friends. I have a very poor quality video of the first lift off. After replacing a broken 'cross' motor mount adapter and tightening down a motor mount with no screw we got it to take off. It would start with tilting to the front right corner, but I got it off the ground. I have also discovered that I have absolutely no Yaw control at all. Full Yaw stick does nothing. I hear the motors speed up but they don't seem to do a thing.

I know that the frame is so bit that it will require PID tuning... and a lot of it. I have enabled more logging so that I can tune it correctly.

Several of the main frame parts on the plexiglass DJC1000-X4 'beta' frame we blocked by the wires from the HobbyKing Power Distribution Board. As a result some of the screws could no go in and the battery plate broke after several short attempts to fly getting no higher than about 5 feet off the ground. Having done no PID tuning and just throwing the frame together tonight I am very happy with the results.

Here are a few pictures from tonight for your enjoyment.





5 comments:

Justin said...

Fly it till it breaks! It was fun, I will send you the video from last night.

Gpanos said...

Hi. Very nice job with the multi-rotor !! I also liked the previous version and going to build my own with a similar motor/ESC(same)/frame
configuration with custom built APM 2. I would like to ask something about the Hobbywing Skywalker 20A ESC you used. Does it support for reversed propeller rotation ? Like this that 3D Helis have for aerobatics ?
Looking forward to your next DJC1000-X4 posts !

Derek said...

@Gpanos, as far as I understand you can only do reverse rotation with a variable pitch propeller like a helicopter. I think that needs to be handled by the servos on the swash plate or something. I am not experienced in helis, but I know that normal propellers don't work very well backwards. They are not shaped correctly to push air backwards.

Gpanos said...

@Derek, thanks for the reply. I'm probably not going to try much 3D aerobatics in this build (my 1st). I do, though, have some experience with helis (have crashed some many times!) but they're very different in terms of operation. By the way, what do you think of the idea of variable-pitch quadrotor propellers ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIkqqVr_u9U ) ?

Derek said...

@Gpanos, I think that variable-pitch is very neat and can add some really cool functionality, but I don't know if it is worth the extra complexity and possible sources of problems that it adds. Here is a variable-pitch quadcopter with one motor that I saw a while ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1FqV36oEYE

Your video was very interesting and gave some additional uses for the variable-pitch, but whatever software and hardware you use would need to support this extra functionality. This likely also adds to the cost. Very interesting once it gets cheaper and more common. Thanks for the link!