AH-6Z Littlebird Night-Ops build project

[wgt40w]

Hopefully, with the new and improved avionics, Juan will be able to fly the thing without crashing it !!

[Zeeflyboy]

we can but hope!

Had some light weight sound deadening foam lying around so decided to fit a little to the insides of the heli to try and reduce the sound bouncing around in there... sometimes scale helis can sound a little "hollow" imo so hopefully this will help.... the Fractals are now hidden behind the deadening.




I also upgraded the tail servo to a more torquey unit to cope with the 4 blade tail better and also because it can cope with the 6v BEC voltage I want to run at while the futaba technically isn't rated for it (though common wisdom says it survives ok). The replacement is a MKS HBL980 which the specs say has

Operating Speed (6.0V): 0.04 sec/60° degrees at no load
Stall Torque (6.0V): 62.5 oz/in (4.5 kg.cm)
Gear Type: Titanium Gears


Sexy!





And if you watch the videos I posted you may notice the head is always spinning before it starts up. The reason for this is that this particular YGE ESC just cannot be made to do a smooth initial start. It spools up nice and slowly but the very initial motion is always jerky and jerks the blades out of alignment which pisses me off so I have been pre-spinning the head to stop the sudden kick... I used to use this ESC in my 600 Pro too and it had the same issue there. Anyway I've finally given up on ever getting it to start smoothly and have instead removed it. I have pulled the Kontronik Jive 80HV from another craft and will be fitting it to this instead

Due to the lower profile I can move this further forwards under the motor which will help with CG, and allows room to fit some caps as you can see in the pic (esc wires will run back by one side).




And here I have wired up one of the weapons pods. The idea is fairly simple, there is a 6 pin plug that carries all the required wires and will slot into a 6 pin receptacle in the fuselage. I printed up a couple of joints for the wires to run neatly into the main body of the arm.

[ClippedWing]

Lovely Scale work Zee!

[Zeeflyboy]

Ta, but i haven't really done much new there lol


Here is a design I came up with for an anti vibration ace one mount.





Printed out the mount, looks like it all fits... with the mass of the Ace One I've gone with the stiffer dampers - we'll see how it how it works out.

[DaveyLC]

Its a damn fine work of art but isn't the IMU already dampened inside the ACE One?

[Zeeflyboy]

Actually I don't think it does... all reference I've seen to the inherent damping ability refers to the mass of the aluminium case.

Here you can see a picture of the internals - there is no obvious vibration damping such as you would find in the Naza for example.




on top of that see this reference to the importance of isolating vibrations in the manual:




and the final evidence I would like to submit m'honour is the below IMU vibration damping kit for the S800 (which uses the Wookong, same style IMU as Ace One)

http://www.dji.com/product/s800-vibration-absorber-kit

S800 Vibration Absorber Kit

The kit contains six dampers and an IMU mounting plate. You can install these easily onto your S800 without making further changes, and flight performance can be greatly improved. All you have to do is install the six dampers between the S800 frame arms and the landing gear. The air-core damping ball within the dampers will absorb the high frequency vibration. It effectively reduces the high frequency vibration influence to the IMU and gimbal, and makes the S800 flight more stable.

happy? ;)

[ClippedWing]

Happy as Pig in s**t

[DaveyLC]

Ah, I thought it would be similar to a Naza/Wookong :) that's a beefy old IMU shield jeebus!

[Zeeflyboy]

Little update...

So for those that haven't seen it in my micro quad thread, here is my new CNC table... much more spacious than the old one!




And here it is getting started on my latest part for the AH-6...




These are something I had been meaning to make for a while... proper braces for the bottom plate. I had whipped up a temporary solution that was functional but heavier than needed and as I came to move the ESC I realised I could really do with some extra wiring space on the floor pan. So this is what was in there before - just a 10mm square piece of alu.





And these are the proper replacements after drilling and tapping:





So as you can see this now gives me much more room to comfortably run my ESC wiring, and of course shaves off some weight in the process.

[Zeeflyboy]

Machined out my new dash today from 2mm G10:








The inserts have been ordered from shapeways last week and should arrive within the next week or so. I also ordered the screens, though initially they will just be animated images rather than functional, but I didn't want to add yet more delay waiting for that, and now that I'll be using those screens it will be simple to upgrade to functional software later.

On a side note, it's amazing how much more productive you are when you aren't constantly fighting you machinery lol. I'm really loving how reliable and precise the new machine is.



-----


So the screens arrived, again just animated for now... not yet functional. Unfortunately shapeways is being pants and hasn't shipped my latest order despite it being due 2 days ago, so I still don't have the extra pieces for the dash.

anyway, the screens:

[DaveyLC]

Are they little displays with SD card readers?   :o

What formats can they play?

[Zeeflyboy]

yes but not actually using the SD cards, this is all programmed in the existing memory.

Once done they won't be playing anything - they'll be doing a real time display based on info from a small IMU and GPS board.

[Zeeflyboy]

Printed up some special brackets and mounted the screens. Decided I really need to flip the nav display for space reasons, so now I need to figure out how to invert the display. All things are possible though. Well, most things.






Just waiting for the surrounds etc from shapeways, Screens have a real nice anti glare finish...

[Zeeflyboy]

Definitely did slow down but should start to pick up again shortly!

Today I just produced this... An EzUHF mount. I made a 3d printed prototype to test it a while ago but now decided to do the real thing out of aluminium.

This was the 3d printed prototype:

The clamps generate sufficient force that you can just push the EzUHF into position and it will stay there, the tabs prevent it over extending when used as a transmitter stand, and the bottom extends far enough to protect the plugs on the bottom.









I am SUPER chuffed with how this came out, I almost feel like I'm getting the hang of this stuff! Next step will be exploring 2 sided machining but for now I'm really happy with out this came out.


getting started:



taking shape:



et voila!




Glamour shots:

[Zeeflyboy]

Cheers - it's an X6-1500GT