Flying Scotsman 450 X with Wiimotion arduino board...

[jiberjaber]

So I finally decided to bite the bullet and knock up a quad to have a play with.  The last time I had flown a rotary wing was back in about Feb, so I was a bit puzzled as to why I was bothering... but thought I would give it a go.

I was spured on by a thread on rcheliaddict.co.uk which gave an indicative list of bits mostly from hobbyking... so off I went and blindly bought in to it LOL.

I had been messing with Arduino for a month or so prior making a vario unit.  So the quad based on an arduino seemed a logical step to fettle with.

Most of the parts came from HK.  The wii motion and numchuck came from amazon, both second hand but original parts.  About £12 in all.


Numchuck disected and cut in half to mount.


Mounted on a PARIS V4 board.  This gives a convinient mount for the Arduino mini-pro board and also provides some additional circuitary for switching and 3.3v power suplies if required.



The business side of the bord showing the Arduino and wiimotion board.  The red board is a FTDI interface which allows diagnostics.

[jiberjaber]

I decided to get the X-frame from quadframes.co.uk.  Service from Graham was as others have experienced, great :)

At the same time I bought a power distribution board as well... glad I did :)




The power distribution board fits in the middle of the centre part of the frame, I bought some standoffs with the frame and the 10mm ones did the trick just grand.






The remainder of the build was relativly straight forward.  The motors are HK DT750's with the shaft cut down and the windings secured using epoxy and microballons. 

ESCs are 20Amp HK ones.  I also used a 5A BEC and a lipoly-x lipo alarm.

Props are the HK pusher/puller set, 10x6. All up weight came in at 871 without battery.





To brighten it up, I had bought some LED strips from HK and added these to it.  They are switched off the PARIS board so they illuminate when the ESCs are armed and also flash when the main board is flashing out status.



Some stats now, from running a flight with my SM-modellbau unilog2 I gathered some info on the power consumption.  Peak current was about 49Amps, hover was about 15 - 16A. 

[jiberjaber]

So final installment....

Night time maiden...

FSM450 Quad Night Maiden

I had a few hickups on the first few flights, this has lead to be testing the stregth of the fibreglass frame.  Predictably, this has lead to some repairs...

First few we due to the prop-saver adaptors coming loose.  This was fixed with some flats dremelled on to the motor shaft, and then they were replaced with proper adaptors.  This neccesatated the driling out of the props from 4mm to 6.5mm, which was a bit of a challenge!

The prop coming off flexed a leg a bit too much, but CA and carbon tow made a good repair.

First big crash was the following:

FSM450Bartletts291011

The resultant damage was that one leg was tore off.



The repair was fairly easy, I had soem carbon sheet which was CA'ed in to place on both sides of the breaks.




The second big bump happened on Friday, the quad lost control about 100m up in the gusting wind and resulted in it performing a number of rolls on the way down.  I expected to find a similar wreakage to the first big 'in'.  But all that was broken was all 4 props and the frame was twisted around the centre section (the top section had rotated one direction, whilst the bottom had rotated the opps direction).  This resulted in the motors being tilted!.... a quick fix with an allen key.

So.  With my FPV gear hopefully being put on teh slow boat from China (even though I have forked out for EMS! LOL) I should be FPV with this in the next week or so...  Plan is to make a top plate to mount the addtional gear on to - on the underside of the top place... this should also provide some protection to the top of the control boards.

Happy flying! :)