Went out to the field eraly this morning with the two MK, two of the little quads, and for the first time in a long time one of the RC helis. The MK flew as they always do, although today I was focusing on completely manual flight with both of them, not something I've done a lot of with either one. Not surprisingly the smaller standard MK proved to be easier to keep straight and at a fairly constant altitude, the bigger Droidworx heavy lifter wasn't carrying enough weight so it was pretty hard to keep the altitude consistent.
The mini quad was out for its first time with a new flight controller, a KK Plus 5.5d, one of the new generation SMD boards running Mike Barton's C code firmware. Nice board for aerobatics and this one doesn't tend to lose its trim across a battery pack like the older versions did. I had the field to myself for several hours after I got there so I setup a tripod with the video camera to try and get the first test flight on video. Did fairly well but misjudged the camera's field of view and some of the flying goes off screen to the left...
I really like the way it flys and it just wants to loop and flip. After the first flight I got more aggressive with it and started doing a few loops and tried a flip or two, probably the easiest I've ever had one of the little quads do it. Then I got a little too brave and tried to loop it at a much lower altitude and that was a big mistake as it was too low to pull out and recover, here's the result...
It hit right on the end of the arm and pushed the motor and mount about half way down towards the center plates, problem is the ESC occupies much of that space, or at least it did. When I got over to where it went down I saw smoke billowing out from underneath, thought I was about to see my first lipo fire up close then I noticed the pack off to the side still connected. When the motor slid up the arm it squashed the ESC between itself and the center plates the smoke was from a shorted capacitor...
As soon as I disconnected the battery the smoke stopped, not sure what might have happened if it had taken a little longer to get to it, maybe the smoke would have become flame or if the short was bad enough the pack might have eventually lit up.
As it is the ESC is toast, take a look at the bend in the board, this one is going in the trash bin as soon as I strip off the connectors...
Oddly the motor and prop are fine, didn't even bend the shaft in the motor! The arm is trashed, ESC, the case of the receiver is broken, and a couple of the pins bent where something obviously smashed into the RX connections and pushed them back a bit. I haven't tried to power any of it up yet so too early to tell if that's all the damage or not but considering how hard this thing hit the ground it survived remarkably well.
Shortly after that I managed to stuff my Trex 450 into the dirt too, so at that point I packed up and headed back home before I the chance to crash anything else...
Ken
The mini quad was out for its first time with a new flight controller, a KK Plus 5.5d, one of the new generation SMD boards running Mike Barton's C code firmware. Nice board for aerobatics and this one doesn't tend to lose its trim across a battery pack like the older versions did. I had the field to myself for several hours after I got there so I setup a tripod with the video camera to try and get the first test flight on video. Did fairly well but misjudged the camera's field of view and some of the flying goes off screen to the left...
I really like the way it flys and it just wants to loop and flip. After the first flight I got more aggressive with it and started doing a few loops and tried a flip or two, probably the easiest I've ever had one of the little quads do it. Then I got a little too brave and tried to loop it at a much lower altitude and that was a big mistake as it was too low to pull out and recover, here's the result...
It hit right on the end of the arm and pushed the motor and mount about half way down towards the center plates, problem is the ESC occupies much of that space, or at least it did. When I got over to where it went down I saw smoke billowing out from underneath, thought I was about to see my first lipo fire up close then I noticed the pack off to the side still connected. When the motor slid up the arm it squashed the ESC between itself and the center plates the smoke was from a shorted capacitor...
As soon as I disconnected the battery the smoke stopped, not sure what might have happened if it had taken a little longer to get to it, maybe the smoke would have become flame or if the short was bad enough the pack might have eventually lit up.
As it is the ESC is toast, take a look at the bend in the board, this one is going in the trash bin as soon as I strip off the connectors...
Oddly the motor and prop are fine, didn't even bend the shaft in the motor! The arm is trashed, ESC, the case of the receiver is broken, and a couple of the pins bent where something obviously smashed into the RX connections and pushed them back a bit. I haven't tried to power any of it up yet so too early to tell if that's all the damage or not but considering how hard this thing hit the ground it survived remarkably well.
Shortly after that I managed to stuff my Trex 450 into the dirt too, so at that point I packed up and headed back home before I the chance to crash anything else...
Ken
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