eric's model flying blog

After connecting up the motors, and the battery (props still removed!), the moment of truth was there... No smoke! So no electrical shorts yet. Then for the first time ever spanning up the motors! I had attached a piece of sticky-tape to the motor shafts, so that I could see the turning direction (the tape bends due to the forces of the air, and stays deformed after stopping the motors). Of course, two out of 4 turned in the wrong direction, so I had to swap two wires per motor to get that corrected. I had deliberately connected the motors with bullet connectors, both for modularity, and for being able to quickly correct this. After swapping the wires, and one last check of the spinning directions, it was time to mount the props. Again, observing the turning directions. Then, outside, with the quad in my hand - looking out for the diameter of the props to be well clear of anything, especially my arms - a first spin-up. With about 1/3 throttle, I tested out if the corrections...

After first flight, comes first mods 😉 One of those things you know in advance about this hobby: once you have a flying system, you recognize opportunities for improvement, which leads to modifications. That's just as sure a bet as saying you will crash at some time.  In this design, I initially had the battery placed between the top and the bottom plate. But there was no good way to secure it such, that it would not slide forward or backward between the plates. And a slidings battery is disastrous for the Centre of Gravity being as good as possible in the middle, as the battery is by far the heaviest component. There was not enough room for friction material. Hook-and-loop would be even thicker, and require the battery to be peeled off, for which there was no room either of course. So the battery had to go under the bottom plate, with hook-and-loop, and a battery strap for added security. But landing on the battery is not the brightest idea, so I ordered some of those l...

As a Mechanical Engineer, working in the machine-building industry, I got interested in the possibilities of IoT applications. So I started reading up on the subject of sensors, and data processing. I soon stumbled upon the Arduino environment. It's a relatively easy programming environment (C++) which can be used to program relatively cheap I/O boards of that same brand (or even cheaper Chinese clones thereof). After some simpler projects with data collection from sensors, data manipulation, and outputting a response (like reading an RFID chip, checking against known chips, outputting an LED color dependent on the ID) I more or less accidentally found a website of a guy that had made a quadcopter flight controller out of an Arduino. Since I am interested in anything that flies, I sort of wanted to be able to do the same. But then again, I did not want to spend much money on a project with a high risk of failure, so I "chopped it up" in smaller pieces. First of all,...