General Info
(This is an extensive project. This Hackster page will only show the highlights. Please visit my original posts below for all the details you will need!)
Original post - Part 1 - Part 2
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Like everyone else, I wanted a VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) UAV for aerial photography and all-around fun that I could fly FPV (first person view) via onboard camera and wireless video downlink to a head-mounted display at my ground station.
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The xAircraft frame is pretty expensive as quad frames go, but it is quite nice. it’s made of a really stiff and tough fibrous plastic, and is quite light. I like that it comes with the tall landing gear, which provides a lot of room to mount the camera stabilization gimbal below. The stabilization is for the Arial video capture camera, while the FPV camera will be mounted rigidly to the frame so that I stay in touch with what the airframe is doing.
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I couldn’t find any reliable documentation about the configuration options/order for the programmable speed controllers that I bought, so I am going to flash them with an open source firmware that is optimized for multicopters, and said to be a vast improvement over the standard speed controller code.
The Turnigy 9x radio that I bought is said to be a nice set of sticks, but with weak software. Fortunately, there is also open source firmware called ER9x is that improves things. I’ll probably end up flashing the radio as well.
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Well I like beeps as much as the next guy, but after reading the documentation that was supposed to be correct for my speed controllers (and especially looking over the chart below), I lost faith that I would successfully be able to transmitter-stick program the ESC’s.
(see the programming instructions in an image below)
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Fortunately, many of these cheap Turnigy/HobbyKing ESC’s use Amtel ATmega8 chips, and can be easily flashed using an AVR programmer to load an open source firmware written by RCgroups member Simon Kirby. There is a spreadsheet that shows which version of the firmware that you should use with which speed controller. This firmware eliminates the low-voltage cut-off protection, and is supposed to provide a great overall performance boost over the standard firmware.
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(see more instructions and pictures in further modules below)
The Frame
Programming code (might have to change)
Naza failsafe auto-landing
Parts
Assembly (beginning)
Comments