Made a lot of progress in the last 24 hours, the ESC's I needed arrived in yesterday's mail so I spent last evening getting the necessary connectors soldered on, setting the programming options, then installing on the frame and connecting the motors. Around 9:00 AM this morning I caught a break in the rain showers we're having and managed to get outside for a test flight, had some issues with it wanting to yaw slowly to the right after it got in the air so I landed and brought it back in to check things out. Found I had somehow managed to reverse most of the top/bottom motor connections while I had the ESC's disconnected for programming, fixed that and tried again only this time it wanted to yaw in the other direction, hmmm...
Back in the house and hook it up to laptop for a look at the setup and had one of those DUH moments, the mixer table was still setup for a quad! Fixed that and finally had it flying normally. Initial flights were done with a 3S 2200 mAh pack and naturally the 8 motors sucked that down pretty quick so I landed it after less than 5 minutes before it ran out of juice. Rain started back up right about then so I decided to tackle the few things I still needed to do on the camera mount and that wound up taking 4 or 5 hours to machine the pieces and get it all reassembled and back on the frame. By the time I had all that done the rain had been stopped for a while so I went out for another test flight, this time with a 4S 5000 mAh pack.
Flew pretty good though I didn't see a lot of difference on the bigger battery, still has plenty of power and hovers at a bit below half throttle.The control response seems a lot better than what it had as a quad, and it's amazingly quiet, a lot quieter than either of the Hexa's so I would guess that has a lot to do with the stacked counter rotating motors. Still had the gain settings from the quad setup so I figured it wouldn't hurt to try some changes to see if it would make a difference so I came back in and hooked it up to the laptop again. While I was at it I decided to upgrade the firmware to the newest version, didn't like the results when I had upgraded to it in the quad config but a few people have said it works well with the X8 so I decided to give it another try. They were right it works a lot better on an X8 than it did on the quad, still has a lot of annoying quirks in it though and they messed up the tilt and roll compensation trying to fix the roll servo jittering from the last version, now it slows to a crawl as it nears level and takes way too long to settle out. If things are happening quickly then it tends to overshoot level and has to back up though the Avertical mount tries really hard to deal with it.
Went out for one last flight with the GoPro on the mount just to get a feel for what the mount was doing and it actually turned out fairly well other than the platform level was off. Yet another annoying quirk of the Hoverfly code, it changes the level setting once the board is fully armed which it can't be when doing the setup so you have to kind of eyeball it and do a lot of trial and error until you find the correct offset between the set point in setup and the set point after it arms so that the platform winds up actually level when the board is ready to fly. Did I mention the firmware has a lot of annoying quirks?
Anyway, I flew for a timed 5 minutes to get an idea of what the power usage is going to be like with the GoPro recording during the flight. Somehow managed to get the firmware gain setting pretty close for taking a shot in the dark and it flew well, auto level sort of worked, it only wanted to drift slightly rearward and a tiny bit to the right, so overall a very successful flight. I didn't tempt fate by trying altitude hold, it barely worked in this firmware version on the quad, didn't feel like I needed the excitement of watching it either drop 10 feet or shoot skyward when I flipped the switch so I leave that for another day.
So far I really like the way it flys, its quiet, has plenty of power, control response is outstanding, stability is very good, now all I need is a flight control board that works the way its supposed to. As soon as the I2C to PWM convertor I ordered last week gets here I am definitely going to swap in one of the MK flight controller boards and see how it flys with that, already have an X8 mixer table for it, just need the last piece of the puzzle to make it work.
I'm going to try and get over to a ball field near the house in the morning for a test flight with the video cam on the mount if the rain holds off for a while, I'm really curious to see how it does in a large area where I can actually fly it around.
Oh yeah, power consumption appears to be about the same as the AD-6 heavy lifter, the battery will hit 80% discharge at around 7 1/2 to 8 minutes, so I think I'll be flying a pair of the 4S 5000 packs in parallel and that should give me about 12 minutes flight time.
Ken
Back in the house and hook it up to laptop for a look at the setup and had one of those DUH moments, the mixer table was still setup for a quad! Fixed that and finally had it flying normally. Initial flights were done with a 3S 2200 mAh pack and naturally the 8 motors sucked that down pretty quick so I landed it after less than 5 minutes before it ran out of juice. Rain started back up right about then so I decided to tackle the few things I still needed to do on the camera mount and that wound up taking 4 or 5 hours to machine the pieces and get it all reassembled and back on the frame. By the time I had all that done the rain had been stopped for a while so I went out for another test flight, this time with a 4S 5000 mAh pack.
Flew pretty good though I didn't see a lot of difference on the bigger battery, still has plenty of power and hovers at a bit below half throttle.The control response seems a lot better than what it had as a quad, and it's amazingly quiet, a lot quieter than either of the Hexa's so I would guess that has a lot to do with the stacked counter rotating motors. Still had the gain settings from the quad setup so I figured it wouldn't hurt to try some changes to see if it would make a difference so I came back in and hooked it up to the laptop again. While I was at it I decided to upgrade the firmware to the newest version, didn't like the results when I had upgraded to it in the quad config but a few people have said it works well with the X8 so I decided to give it another try. They were right it works a lot better on an X8 than it did on the quad, still has a lot of annoying quirks in it though and they messed up the tilt and roll compensation trying to fix the roll servo jittering from the last version, now it slows to a crawl as it nears level and takes way too long to settle out. If things are happening quickly then it tends to overshoot level and has to back up though the Avertical mount tries really hard to deal with it.
Went out for one last flight with the GoPro on the mount just to get a feel for what the mount was doing and it actually turned out fairly well other than the platform level was off. Yet another annoying quirk of the Hoverfly code, it changes the level setting once the board is fully armed which it can't be when doing the setup so you have to kind of eyeball it and do a lot of trial and error until you find the correct offset between the set point in setup and the set point after it arms so that the platform winds up actually level when the board is ready to fly. Did I mention the firmware has a lot of annoying quirks?
Anyway, I flew for a timed 5 minutes to get an idea of what the power usage is going to be like with the GoPro recording during the flight. Somehow managed to get the firmware gain setting pretty close for taking a shot in the dark and it flew well, auto level sort of worked, it only wanted to drift slightly rearward and a tiny bit to the right, so overall a very successful flight. I didn't tempt fate by trying altitude hold, it barely worked in this firmware version on the quad, didn't feel like I needed the excitement of watching it either drop 10 feet or shoot skyward when I flipped the switch so I leave that for another day.
So far I really like the way it flys, its quiet, has plenty of power, control response is outstanding, stability is very good, now all I need is a flight control board that works the way its supposed to. As soon as the I2C to PWM convertor I ordered last week gets here I am definitely going to swap in one of the MK flight controller boards and see how it flys with that, already have an X8 mixer table for it, just need the last piece of the puzzle to make it work.
I'm going to try and get over to a ball field near the house in the morning for a test flight with the video cam on the mount if the rain holds off for a while, I'm really curious to see how it does in a large area where I can actually fly it around.
Oh yeah, power consumption appears to be about the same as the AD-6 heavy lifter, the battery will hit 80% discharge at around 7 1/2 to 8 minutes, so I think I'll be flying a pair of the 4S 5000 packs in parallel and that should give me about 12 minutes flight time.
Ken