How did I get back into multirotors? It was a really lucky purchase on RCGroups. Someone offloaded a drone package for a really good price. I purchased it, did a bit of work, and sold everything but something to get me started. It was a somewhat working Nighthawk 280 with emax 2204 motors, emax 12amp escs, a cc3d, sony 700tvl camera, skyzone ts5823 vtx, and a few 1500mah 3s lipos.
I flew it a few times line of sight but I really wanted FPV so I purchased a Quanum V2 setup from HobbyKing and off I went! On my 10th or so flight (Angle mode) when I was doing a quick turn it started flipping and fell out of the sky! After lots of research I saw that it was most likely motor/esc syncing issues. I flashed blheli on the escs (these don't support damped light and I don't recall if they support oneshot) and started testing all of my motors. After endless configuration settings I decided to purchase all new cobra 2204 1960kv motors and SN20 ESCs. I haven't looked back since!
Here are some of the mistakes I made while going through all this:
Pay attention to your battery C rating! When I had my new setup going I was still using the old 3s batteries and puffed them quick. I had 3x 1500mah 25c batteries that were capable of 37.5 amps (1.5ah x 25) and 2x 1500mah 35c (1.5ah x 35) batteries that were capable of 52.5 amps. According to the rotorgeeks website for my motor (http://rotorgeeks.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=77) the 5x4x3 triple blade props I was running on 3s were pulling around 11.7amps per motor or almost 48 amps! No wonder I puffed those 25c batteries.
Flashing madness! I run BetaFlight (Boris Github repository - https://github.com/borisbstyle/betaflight) on my cc3d and that project is updated very frequently. I could flash new firmware every week if I was up for it. First off, flashing the cc3d is a pain. Every time I want to flash new firmware I first open up openpilot, recover it and flash the default firmware, then flash the newest version of betaflight. After that I can open up the Cleanflight app again and get to work. One note with cc3d. You MUST plug in your lipo before connecting the board to your computer!
Build as clean as you can. I haven't had the opportunity to use one of the all in one power distribution boards (PDBs) so I have wires running everywhere. If I have a little glitch in my video feed it can sometimes take awhile to find what wire is coming loose. Even if you have all your connections hot glued or use thick ca they can still come lose!
No comments:
Post a Comment