Eurofighter FPV build

[FPVSteve]

Won't it affect the flight camera white balance though?

[Zeeflyboy]

at night it would for sure, but I think during daytime it's just not powerful enough to cause any trouble.... seems okay looking through the goggles so far.

[Zeeflyboy]

Okay, I managed to get a crappy pic by sticking my iPhone cam right up to the goggle lens. Needless to say it's not really great (iPhone pic of tiny LCD screen slightly out of focus... never going to be fantastic) but it does give a some idea of what it looks like when viewed from the cam... As I say I do have a recording device on my to buy list so I will manage better in future. Previously always flew using GoPro live out and recording onboard so never needed one.




You can just about make out the on screen display... artificial horizon just up by the HUD (just below the flight vector), altitude on the right, airspeed on the left (mostly blocked out by the overexposure of the iPhone there), GPS status bottom right, mah burnt in the middle bottom with direction indicator just above it, distance from operator on bottom left.

[bignose13]

That's frikking awesome mate, cant wait for the FPV from this beaut

[FPVSteve]

That really does look cool!

[fpsazerbaijan]

Whoa! Excellent work mate! Lookin' forward to seeing some FPV footage  :D

[cornishairrc]

im too jel this is sick im really exsited to see this fpv'ed

[Zeeflyboy]

muhahahaaa I have something I'm quite proud of to show you guys.


Here's a little sneak peek of the cockpit with full moving controls! Still a little tweaking to do and the cockpit is far from finished but I was just too chuffed with myself to not show it to you all! I spent a good amount of time today at work designing the mechanism I would use to get both elevator and aileron on the control stick, and I'm glad to say my idea worked pretty well.

The idea now will be to run the EZUHF in PPM mode, hook up a PPM decoder in the front which will then feed the thrust lever servo, aileron+elevator control stick servos, pan/tilt servos and canard servo. that means I only have one wire running up to the front, and one wire running from the EZUHF to the OSD Pro.

Let me know what you think....

Sneak peak Eurofighter FPV cockpit

[papa_lazerous]

That video is pretty sick mate, I do have one observation though....  I couldn't see the rudder pedals moving  :P

[FPVSteve]

No words for how cool that is :)

[Zeeflyboy]

Hah, I figured rudder pedals were a step too far!

cheers chaps!

The nice thing is that they are only 3.8g servos... so for all 3 there it's only about 12g and maybe at most 20g for the lot including linkages.

I think 20 grams is a price worth paying!

[Zeeflyboy]

just in case anyone is interested in how I hooked up the controls here's a couple of pics of the underside of the canopy. Not pretty, but it does the job! Perhaps it may be of use if anyone is wondering how to do it - this is just one approach but I spent a while scratching my head as to the best way to achieve it.







Simple description:

Control stick:

Joystick stuck onto 2mm carbon rod, and slightly over sized 2mm hole drilled in the section of the dash where it sits. Heat shrink stops the stick from falling through.... I then fitted another piece of heat shrink from underneath and voila, the stick is locked in place.

I then drilled out two heli linkage balls with a 2mm drill and placed them on the 2mm carbon rod.

Using a 90 degree bell crank and some heli linkage rods (connected together with 2mm carbon rod rather than the heavier standard threaded steel rod) I hooked it all up.  Surprisingly simple!

Throttle was done by cutting two strips of plastic card, and putting a pivot point (again 2mm carbon rod) through them at about 2/3rds the way down. These were then sleeved in a plastic sleeve so they could be glued into the foam and still be free to rotate inside the sleeve.

I then made a little tab (again, more plastic card) to connect the linkage to.

Easy!

[6lennn]

Omg zee, this is totally wicked

I would never fly it, have you got a glass case somewhere to keep safe

its art

:respekt:

[Zeeflyboy]

Ah it has to be flown... If it crashes then that's just an excuse to make an even better v2!

so here is a slightly simplified wiring diagram... I've included power line runs where its relevant but left out where it's not (e.g. servo connections)

I think I have everything there.... This is the plan with using the PPM function on the OSD Pro and EZUHF. As you can see using the PPM decoder up front will really simplify wiring runs for all those servos up there - thanks to the guys that have helped me out with that solution!

For the PPM wires I intend to use Cat6 S/FTP wiring for maximum interference rejection .

Anyone see any horrific mistakes there? I think I've done my best to avoid ground loops but I could do with a fresh set of eyes.

Couple of notes:

- the eLogger requires the Y connection to throttle to both log throttle position and also to provide backup power since I am running it on HV... that's why that's there.

- vTX is powering the Camera from it's own 5v supply, this passes through the OSD Pro on which the positive is isolated, but my voltmeter tells me ground is common.

- vTX is powered by 4S from one of the flight packs. Series connection gives 8S to the eLogger and ESC.

- OSD Pro with guardian mixes the aileron and elevator to give an eleven output, no elevon mix is applied in the TX side





for further info, is is my channel allocation

Ch1 - aileron
Ch2 - elevator
Ch3 - rudder
Ch4 - throttle
Ch5 - OSD aux 1
Ch6 - OSD aux 2 (guardian gain)
Ch7 - pan
Ch8 - tilt

Now of course if you need retractable gear, you have to either have more than 8 channels, or sacrifice a pan or tilt channel, or if you don't use guardian you can use one channel for the osd.

The other problem is that you can't have canard or thrust vectoring on a sperate channel mixed in, so mixing has to be done mechanically and will be fixed rate. If not using the guardian you can get away with a single switch for osd, and of course you don't necessarily need pan/tilt so you can free up to 3 channels for gear, thrust vector and canard mix purposes.

[6lennn]

4s to power the vtx, isnt that a bit....much

and 8s to power the motor, kin el

plz note, i only know enough to be a danger to myself