New member, first build. Could use some advice.

[vinito]

Yea. My approach with the S500 MR was not to try too much at one time, but I think I still dove in just a little too deep. I'm hoping that the 250 with a much simpler but still capable controller will give me less grief and be more enjoyable. It might be good to be working out on the 250 how to set up the Taranis, a fairly complex machine in itself, instead of throwing another can of worms into a container already full of bugs.

Plus, I just discovered today that a few people have worked out how to drive Hubsans and Symas with hobby-level transmitters, so I'm planning to fiddle with that too. Sounds like a fairly simple hack, at least with the code already being written by somebody with those chops it is anyway. I've been tinkering with microcontrollers just a little over the past few years so it might be pretty fun to cobble my own copy of their mod design. Looks like it's just an Arduino pro mini, a transmitter module and a couple little odds & ends. A $10 hack.

So I figure a couple weeks or so with the 250 before I dig back into the S500. I"m not missing it yet either.

 

[vinito]

I got the little 250 together last night and started fiddling with it today. I've been trying to wrap my head around PID settings and I think I've got a vague idea what to do, but I haven't ironed it out yet.

D'oh! I just this second realized that I've been doing is trying to adjust kP settings with the default I and D settings already in it. I think I should probably set those to zero and try again. Maybe that's why I'm getting kind of odd results.

Anyway, my first attempt with the thing was a bit snappy to the point of being difficult to control and I ended up mildly colliding with a cardboard box. It broke the prop. Dammit! It just came with four stock props and though I have more on the way, that was it until the new ones arrive. My mail usually gets here about 11:00am and when I checked about 2:00 I had no mail so I thought I was dead in the water. But lo and behold, about 3:30 the mail truck dropped by and more lo's and behold's, some props were in there!

So I put them in and started fiddling some more. These props are more flexible and though I've had mild collisions around the room a couple times, they are not nearly as brittle because they are still just fine.

Here's a quick pic of the thing:

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It's pretty cute, huh? I've GOT to try it after dark tonight. It really lights up like a searchlight. That ought to be kinda fun.

I got the replacement part for the 500 yesterday and I'll tinker with it later this week. I'm still not obsessively inspired to work on it after the past frustrations with it, which is weird for me since I tend to go off the deep end on hobbies. That's OK. I have a new toy to fly for now and I'll get the bigger one going soon enough.

I feel like I kinda did the right thing with this 250 quad.

 

[vinito]

I just got done flying the 250 a little. It needs more fine tuning but it's not too bad. It's fairly stable whatever I try to do with it and it seems to cut through the wind like a knife.. MAN this thing is fast ! (at least for me it seems so). It's a total hoot! And all those LEDs look great in the nighttime. Below 5 feet or so it throws a glow on the ground and looks like a UFO or searchlight or something.

Not knowing any different I was kind of thinking that the little 1804 motors I got might be underpowered on this frame with a 1500mAh battery, but it seems far from underpowered. It hovers around 50% and when I bump the throttle it really shoots up fast. Of course all this is relative and I have no experience around you guys' toys. It works for me though.

Earlier today my brother dropped by and wanted to see me fly it so I took it out and within two minutes I flew it into the only damned obstacle in the area (overhead wire) and crashed it, breaking a landing foot, an arm and it's LED pc strip. I got to feeling like this quad thing is good for about 2 minutes , so $100/minute? But I had other things to do anyway and came back to it later. The repair took about an hour so it wasn't too bad.

Lucky for me I've been building things for a living for a couple decades or so and hobby with electronics a fair bit, so although the broken bits would probably be just trash for most, it was fixable. As long as you have a fortune in tools and materials laying around, a lot of things can be fixed after all!

So I had this mission's glitch, and I've just doomed it by saying that, but I'm glad I got this little stepping stone and the second flying session was so much fun that I've been charged up about the hobby. Yaaaay.

edit to add: Went through another battery's worth. Holy Crap this thing is fun !!!
Total darkness this time and it's pretty windy tonight, but it doesn't bother this little quad much at all. I'm starting to get more comfortable with it already and even in the wind, it will shoot off across the yard, spin a quick 180 to burn back, then stop and hover nice and steady. Couldn't begin to think about doing that with the toys with the wind as brisk as it was tonight. This 250 just shrugs it off. Maybe the ballast of the battery is just right for it - sure seems zippy despite the weight.

It's a little easy to lose orientation from time to time unless it's up over about 15 feet, so I was thinking about adding some ping-pong balls to the feet. I can put some orange ones on the back and white on the front, then maybe insert LEDs inside the balls (front green and back red) to see them glow at night. Think that might work or is there a better solution? Ping-pong balls break kind of easy but they're light, but maybe something else would be more durable without adding too much weight?

 

[vinito]

Hi folks.
I got pretty busy for a while and haven't had much time to play with my toys. But the past few days I've been kind of getting back into it.
Last weekend I ordered a Fat Shark FPV setup. It's the full kit thing with Predator goggles and 600tvl camera. I am impressed with the latency, or lack of. The image isn't particularly high-resolution, but it's almost instant and with my beginner skill level I think that just translates to one less possible problem.

Yesterday I got it attached and hooked up and gave it a little try. But my quad is set up to be so highly responsive that it was impossible for me to fly it with FPV. That aggressive responsiveness has been kind of bugging me and I've been wanting to adjust it anyway, but I wasn't too secure about how to do it without messing something else up. Then I realized that just putting some expo into it might do the trick and still allow me to whip it around my just moving the sticks further. So I hooked it up to Open Pilot and set it up for quite a bit of expo, then tried it out line of sight. I like it a lot more. It's a ton easier to fly precisely now.

So then I hooked switched on the FPV and donned the goggles for a short try. Well I'll be darned if that didn't do the trick. After reading about other noobies like me having the same difficulty with FPV, I was surprised that I was able to hover for a few minutes and I even started getting a little bit of comfort level doing so. From what I've read, a newcomer to FPV has better luck with forward flight, but I was limited to a pretty small area out in the yard because it was dark and I needed the street light. I can't tell you how pleased I am that it looks like I will be able to do this FPV thing.

I am really looking forward to taking it out Saturday and giving a bit of real flying a try. I don't want to get too overboard, but I would like to actually get above the trees a little and look around a bit.

This little 250 is so fun. If I was asked to recommend something to step up to (after learning on the RTF Micros) I would certainly say some kind of 250 is a good way to go for cheap fun. I'm using the CC3D and it really seems to work well. I have run into some little walls here and there because of the limited sensor package and firmware capabilities, but for the most part it works extremely well. The GUI, like most of the others out there, makes setting it up and tweaking settings and all the other stuff it can do a really fun facet of the package in itself. Plus there is just a vast amount of things you can do with a real flight controller and GUI compared to the toy Hubsans and the like. It's quite a learning curve but as long as you enjoy the feeling you get once you begin to wrap your head around certain parts of it one by one, it's a ton of fun too.

Anyways, just wanted to report that I'm back into the swing of things for now and it's going pretty well.
What fun !!