The Droidworx AD-6 made its first flight in heavy lift configuration yesterday morning at the flying field. Kind of a weird day weather wise, it was partly sunny at the house with little wind and the closer I got to the field the darker the sky got. By the time I unlocked the gate drove in and got setup the clouds had thickened, the wind started gusting, and as soon as I had a battery connected a rain shower came along.
Not much more than a light sprinkle so I decided to fly anyway, immediately noticed the Hexa was all over the place in the breeze. Had A/H set for vario and tried that out, seemed to be working OK, then set position hold and things got really unstable with the Hexa doing the toilet bowl orbiting routine. Obviously the change to the big motors was going to take some PID tuning to get things back to where they were last time I flew with the Roxxy motors, good thing I brought the Netbook along to get into the software.
Flight timer was set for 7 minutes, landed as the 10 second countdown was sounding, put the Hexa in the back of the car as the rain picked up a bit. I gave some thought to packing it in for the day as it looked like it was going to get worse when one of the heli guys arrived, so we hung out under the overhanging rear door of my CRV for a bit and the rain stopped. Did a test flight of the Hoverfly quad in the new MK frame with the new firmware release, flight controller was definitely not happy with the new firmware but that's a story of its own.
Hooked up the Netbook and made some changes to the MK gyro tuning and navi settings, went up for another 7 minutes. Noticeable improvement so I knew I was heading in the right direction on the setting though still not where it needed to be.
For the third flight I switched from vario to fixed A/H and ramped the settings up some more, mainly the gyro stability and dynamic stability settings and this time around it flew nicely with no wobble or orbiting when in P/H. By now the rain had stopped, temperature dropped, and the wind picked up blowing most of the clouds out toward the sea. With the sun out and the wind gusting I made some final tweaks to the settings and flew the last battery packs with the Hexa performing as well as it did on previous flights with the smaller motors.
Even though I didn't get a chance to do any FPV flight or get any decent stills or video it turned out to be a good day for getting a new setup dialed in. The changing conditions made flight challenging though it was good for testing stability. I also did several flights with Hoverfly between taking the Hexa up and did manage to get some video with that one even with it acting up on the new software. If I can find some time to do a bit of cut and paste on the video files I'll post it up on Youtube.
Haven't recharged the Hexa batteries yet to see how much is left after 7 minute flights, I'll do that later today.
Ken
Not much more than a light sprinkle so I decided to fly anyway, immediately noticed the Hexa was all over the place in the breeze. Had A/H set for vario and tried that out, seemed to be working OK, then set position hold and things got really unstable with the Hexa doing the toilet bowl orbiting routine. Obviously the change to the big motors was going to take some PID tuning to get things back to where they were last time I flew with the Roxxy motors, good thing I brought the Netbook along to get into the software.
Flight timer was set for 7 minutes, landed as the 10 second countdown was sounding, put the Hexa in the back of the car as the rain picked up a bit. I gave some thought to packing it in for the day as it looked like it was going to get worse when one of the heli guys arrived, so we hung out under the overhanging rear door of my CRV for a bit and the rain stopped. Did a test flight of the Hoverfly quad in the new MK frame with the new firmware release, flight controller was definitely not happy with the new firmware but that's a story of its own.
Hooked up the Netbook and made some changes to the MK gyro tuning and navi settings, went up for another 7 minutes. Noticeable improvement so I knew I was heading in the right direction on the setting though still not where it needed to be.
For the third flight I switched from vario to fixed A/H and ramped the settings up some more, mainly the gyro stability and dynamic stability settings and this time around it flew nicely with no wobble or orbiting when in P/H. By now the rain had stopped, temperature dropped, and the wind picked up blowing most of the clouds out toward the sea. With the sun out and the wind gusting I made some final tweaks to the settings and flew the last battery packs with the Hexa performing as well as it did on previous flights with the smaller motors.
Even though I didn't get a chance to do any FPV flight or get any decent stills or video it turned out to be a good day for getting a new setup dialed in. The changing conditions made flight challenging though it was good for testing stability. I also did several flights with Hoverfly between taking the Hexa up and did manage to get some video with that one even with it acting up on the new software. If I can find some time to do a bit of cut and paste on the video files I'll post it up on Youtube.
Haven't recharged the Hexa batteries yet to see how much is left after 7 minute flights, I'll do that later today.
Ken
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