Coyote`s Eazystar Build

[Coyote]

Im not too keen on the magnets to be fair, i think ill glue the fuse afterall Mick

The ailerons are hinged on plastic pin hinges and then reinforced tape from staples. The tape can also be bought as cricket bat or hockey stick repair tape off Ebay :)

We taped it to top only following all the contours before sticking to the aileron like this :

[seibernator]

Cheers, nice one! There is a Staples about 5 minutes from me.

Tell me more about the plastic pin hinges, where and how were these installed? Do you need these as well as the reinforced tape?

Is the pic above from the top or the bottom of the wing?

Thanks.

[electricmick]

Thanks for the feedback on the magnets. More decisions, decisions......

[Coyote]

It depends on how you decide to hinge it to be fair, theres lots of different hinge techniques, using the tape alone can work fine as long as you do both top and bottom. Because i used hinges themselves only the top needed doing.

Both with pin hinges, normal plastic hinges or the tape hinges installation is the same, i tapered a 45 degree angle on ailerons to make a point down the centre, the cut the ailerons and glued the hinge in. Once set cut the wing side at hinge points down the centres and glued in place. The 45 degree angles give max movement.

No problem Mick, i`d love to say it was a great idea but honestly not sold on it :)

So i get to the next mod, not a big one by all means, the white nose. With a white nose most FPV cameras pick up the white and balance the light wrongly because of it. Theres many option but i didnt want to paint, tape can shine and poduce glare which also messes with the cameras picture so i went for matt black foam.

I placed a strip right back to the camera so if i want to i can take the gopro pod off and mount a SD camera and still only see a black nose not a white one.



Works well so far ill see better in day;ight tomorrow, simple but effective :)

[seibernator]

Excellent! Just one more question. What width cricket bat repair tape did you buy? Was it 25 or 50mm?

Cheers.

[Coyote]

Either will do for various work, the wider 50mm is good for extra strength under the fuse and you can cut it down, but for ailerons only the 25mm is fine :)

[Coyote]

Well its just typical aint it lol

I get to the field get all setup, only then i descovered that the DVR powers up on the USB connector but in fact it doesn`t actually work off the USB !!! :( Oh well thats that out the window till i fit its own power supply.

Next it turns out that if you keep the Gopro on record for a large amount of time then sony vegas 9 cant hack it, it keeps crashing lol

So anyway had a nice fly around Yearby bank, liked the flight characteristics and found the small Gopro live out screen was nothing really to get upset about. Yes its smaller but wide fov was great and seeing the OSD display was miles better. Only went 1km out but Dragonlink and Gopro seemed to not be bothered with each other in the slightest.

While i figure out how to edit the video, heres a screen shot from the GoPro footage

All in all quite happy maiden done and sucessfull

[Badlands]

The image from the still looks ace. Hope u get the viedo sorted m8.

[Coyote]

Today i swapped over my standard futaba servo that was juddering around centre for a GWS 125 1T 360 degree servo. Now pan is a full 360 degrees

Also fitted the same lights Jay has after he impressed me with his, i put mine in a different flashing order, probably not correct but i think i like it in that order the best for me

Heres a video of it all done :)

EZ so far

[TerrorTrooper]

Thats awesome Ian!
Fair do's its coming along great!

How did you get Ch 6 to work like that??

I set my ailerons to 1 and 5, but 6 wont do anything..
Cant figure it out...  :(

[Coyote]

Thanks Iain

I put my channel 5 assigned switch to swith E ( 3 position switch ) turned off flaps and flap trims, then it works alone ;)

[Chris in Kabul]

Hi All.
I've been watching this build with interest from on the side lines, way out in fact, Kabul where FPV would be very interesting I'm sure but the Yanks would probably shoot it down.
I have an Easystar waiting for me curtesy of Simon of course. I am considering a similar Vtx to you actually the 10Mw one correct? I have also read on here that you can increase the aerial length on the 10Mw, would this make a big difference or would the former be a better choice?
As I said I have all the good stuff waiting for when I get home on the 22nd of December, might just get it ready for a Christmas morning flight.
Interesting to see all the different ways to go about the installations obviously a bit of planning involved. On the ailerons what method of operation did you use? I was thinking of maybe a bellcrank arrangement to the centre of the control.
Will keep watching with interest.
Thanks

Chris

[Coyote]

When using small powered video transmitters theres not much real gain to be had by playing with the antenna configuration. The receiver antenna on the other hand is the way to increase performance drastically

I went for very simple aileron control. Plastic hinged control surface, pom horns with holes dead inline with the pivot point for no mechanical differential.

[Coyote]

Well took it out today for a fly, i was sceptical with the fog.

First off i picked up a new trick i didn`t know about from Shikra, i was on msn talking to him and was on about my 360 pan. With such a lot of movement the pot controlling it was very sensative. Because i didnt want to literally look right round with my head tracker i had that set to 180 degrees and that was very sensative too.

What i needed we came to was dual rates on my channel. I would only use the full 360 degrees now and again. So 180 degrees dual rate would decrease sensativity of head tracker an pot by 50%

To do this Shikra told me a nice little transmitter mix. I went into mix 1. Set master to channel 6 and slave channel to 6 also. What this does is read the channel 6 pot, put the mix inbetween that and the output. To get 180 degrees of movement i needed 50% throw, so the rt % was set to -50% both ways. Assigned a spare switch and hey presto, flick the switch and you have either 180 or 360 throw. Nice one Shikra ! :)

Anyway when i got to the field it didnt take long to suss the gopro does not like low light. The picture i was receiving live from it was ok on the ground, but as soon as i got any decent altitud it got so dark i really couldnt fly. Flying itself wasn`t straight forward. For some reason, after launch, straight after it rolled right over to the right, like loads ! After a few seconds scrapping i got control and managed to level it out with aileron and rudder trims. I couldn`t for the life of my work out what was wrong. Nothing had changed. No weight had shifted ???  

Still heres a video, i was supposd to put annotations on it on youtube but after 4 failed attempts tonight vimeo did it first time

Ez flight with GoPro onboard

My 40 amp Emax ESC couldnt take the punishment i gave it today. After a few flights it was ready to give up. But out of a steep dive on WOT i did clock up 82mph before it did :)

60 amp Turnigy Plush now fitted to cope :)

Update :

Oh man sometimes my stupidity even amazes me lol. Some people say to get your head round a problem sometimes you have to take a step back from it. Well i took a few. Sat down watching children in need and glanced over to the EZ and suddely it became quite apparent what was up. I said nothing had changed since my last flight. Well it had. I had added re-inforced tape to the body and the wings. What i had also done was tape one wing at a much sharper curve than the other. When i was sat the other side of the room it was obvious. One wing straight, the other curved round, that would explain the massive ammounts of trim i had to add. Oh well problem solved, everydays a learning day :)  

Edit : added a few seconds clip from what i could see via gopro live out :

Untitled

[Coyote]

Ive finally finished it lol

Ive now beefed up the ailerons and elevator. They both really flex quite badly so some 1.5mm carbon rods were added and taped over with glass fibre reinforced tape. Much much better now :)





Next was GPS sensor, i noticed a few times it was loosing sat lock. Turned out my sensor was showing up faulty, but i was also concerned that it maybe a bit close to the 2.4ghz transmitter even though before i have never had any issues. I soldered up the socket on the sensor and relocated it further back.

I couldnt get much heat shrink over the plug and cable and plug at a time and didnt want to drag it through and damage it so i cut 6" of heat shrink at a time, then heated up the first piece then overlapped the second unshrunk pice over to get a decent protection over the length.

I then attached some velcro to the EZ fuse and sensor so it can come off with the pod still. Job done



Oh yeah, i replaced all velcro ( red ) with white to match the colour scheme, god how pathetically anal i know :)