I've been quietly reading this forum and watching the tide of updates wash in, followed by a smattering of jitters, wobbles, and crashes wash out. I now find myself with a few expensive pieces of kit sitting idle while everything from my flight controllers to gimbal stabilizers wait for solutions and updates. Over the last few days I decided to go back an re-visit my single rotor heli with an older camera mount that easily floats around with my T2i and has produced usable footage from day1. for the first time in a few months i smiled at how stable and forgiving that old unit was. Honestly, i found balancing my heli and reducing vibrations easier than dealing with my hex. balancing all those motors and props makes for many hours. Anyway, I still look forward to a truly high performing hex, my wallet has obtained too many battle wounds to stop now..
Interesting perspectives, because I have been going in the opposite direction. I was working on SRH's, but got frustrated with the difficulty of reducing vibrations. I'd work so hard, only to still have vibrations which can upset the stabilizer and cause a crash. So I got a quad, and I'm having zero vibration problems, and I'm using cheap props I've never even bothered to balance.
Now, if you have no stabilization system, and are simply using a flybarred heli, it's not as critical to reduce vibes as much as it is to prevent vibes from getting to the camera... which is much much easier. But with a stabilization system, the problem is that the main vibrations are in the same frequency range as the FC is sampling the gyros at, which makes it easy to alias a false signal, which causes a crash. Mulitcopter vibration frequency is much much higher than the FC is running at, so it's harder to get that aliasing.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but just another perspective. I think this is a bit of a "grass is greener" thing.
There's a guy in my club who's a good heli pilot, and got into AP back in the good old says by simply mounting a camera on a flybarred heli, as you say. But he tells me about the extreme difficulty he had flying a shoot at a Golf course. Simply flying the length of a single hole was almost impossible because he couldn't see it anymore. Now he looks at what I'm doing and thinks it's amazing.
I have never flown a SRH with a real camera. I started with ablade 400 and damn that was like balancing on a beach ball in the pool.
I had one of those too! What a POS. It was so hopeless trying to learn to fly on that thing. I haven't had this quad for 2 weeks, and I'm already flying it around like an airplane, hovering nose-in, etc. It's SO easy to fly. I'm thinking of shooting some promotional video with some people that have never ANYTHING before. And it's all on default settings. I haven't done anything to it.
I think that a SRH would fold up and pack away a lot quicker than multis as well.
Very true. No doubt here at all. My 600 can fit in a box... I think it's 48" long, by 10" by 14", something like that. And all you have to do is fold the blades back and stick the foam blade holder on.
I've seen a few multirotor designs where they have bullet connectors built into the arm holders, so you just loosen two screws and pop the arms out. But frankly they make me a little nervous, because I already hear about bullet connectors causing problems, and now you're putting mechanical strain on them (to a certain degree anyway). I think a folding X8 with no bullets is the way to go.
I will say that the price of adding an auto pilot to a SRH is becoming comparable to the price of a pro multi.
Are you saying that the price of the SRH FC alone is the same price as an entire multi setup? With DJI, that seems to be true. But there are other options. Some people have been having good results with Align's APS which is $800. And ours is only $200, but I hesitate to really recommend it until I get some flight time in on the latest firmware. It's been over a month since I flew it since I started working on the quad, and much as changed. Probably for the better but I want to see for myself. We had a really terrible yaw control, and I had just fixed it, and then I had a crash while trying to integrate ESC control into the FC. A small crash, I thought I fixed it, but something caused a vibe which then caused a big crash after the FC lost orientation.
And that's the problem with SRH, it's SO easy for something to go off, causing a vibration which upsets the FC. You hear about guys with FBL controllers with a stabilize mode all the time. They're flying around, doing acrobatics, and then flip a switch for the FBLC to bail them out, only it has locked out stabilize mode after a vibration developed mid-flight!
destroyed by wind meant that it just wont fly smooth enough when the winds get past 10-15.
Really? See, I never hear about these sorts of things. I only see people complaining about our performance, and pointing to videos of DJI, Naza, etc. and saying "see how good this is!"
So just flying around in stabilize isn't smooth when there's wind? I've seen some pretty impressive GPS position holds in really heavy winds. How are they doing that?
And yes, my QC reference was to quality control. There is a reason they make you solder things....they can blame it on you no matter what happens. complete BS!
So what kind of problems do you have, and do you know for sure it's NOT your soldering?
And,,, this leads me into another thought,,, shouldn't the FAA make a two prong attack in making our airways a safe place? Say, like imposing a control measure that would force these manufacturers into living up to their own hype?
Please don't ask for that. Civil aviation was affordable before the government got involved in certifications.
IMO, a big part of the issue here is that what this industry is doing, is basically taking completely untrained people, and throwing an avionics system at them, and it's sort of sink or swim. People who do this professionally are given years of education (ie: aircraft technicians), where as in the hobby industry, people are stuck with inaccurate/outdated Wikis, or manuals written in Chinglish. The system itself may be capable, but the systems is hugely complicated, and you have to get EVERYTHING right.
