eric's model flying blog

GearBest kindly sent me a Ready-To-Fly 90mm brushless qaudcopter to review: the FuriBee GT90 Fire Dancer. As the name suggests, it is a fierce and fiery little spinner! I have not yet had the opportunity to fly the little quad outdoors yet, because of winter weather. And it is actually a little too fierce to be flying indoors, to my taste (I am not that good a flyer yet, so I need lots of room ;) ). Plus, our dog likes to go after that high pitch sound of those 1104 7500KV (!) motors. I did give it a try, but it was so responsive that I crossed the room before I knew it! So I am waiting for an opportunity to go play outside, but I wanted to share my first impressions from the unboxing with you guys (and girls) already. The little pink lady comes fully assembled, with a full set of spare 5-bladed (!) props, and a choice of receivers. I chose the FrSky compatible version , but there is also a FlySky version , and a DSMX version . Or you can choose a version without receiver . ...

Today, I'll be having a first look at this: The FuriBee F90 90mm "Wasp" quadcopter . A nice minidrone that resembles ... a Wasp! The model was kindly offered to me for review by GearBest . Mine is version 1, with a Spektrum receiver.There's also a version without receiver, and one with FrSky receiver, but that one also comes with a transmitter and goggles. I thought that would be a little over the top, but because I don't have a Spektrum transmitter, I requested and got a FlySky micro receiver with the package. What's in the box? In the relatively small box, we find quite a lot, actually! Besides the drone itself, there's a spare seet of 4 props, a 2S 600 mAh LiPo battery, a USB charger for that battery, and a manual of course. The whole setup is very light: only 67 grams, and that's including the LiPo! The Wasp has a "real" Flightcontroller (FC): a personalised version of the OMNIBUS F3 FC. That means, amongst others, t...

When you buy your stuff in China, there are a couple of things you know for sure, and a couple of things you never know. You know that it will take long to arrive. But you never know how long exactly. That is as annoying as it is a treat! Of course, if you want to have something, waiting for it to arrive some 3 to even 6 weeks is long. But it is always a pleasant surprise when your package arrives. It's like getting a present every time a package arrives 😃 This time, my package is even more a present than all packages before... I was asked by GearBest to review some RC stuff for them. And now, there was this present for me at the local postal service office... It's a BFight 210 FPV quadcopter, and since I don't have any FPV equipment yet, it came with budget type goggles: LS-800D. As you can see, it came in this plastic bag, as most of the larger things sent from China seem to be. Inside the bag: a box, and anothe bag... The secondary bag contains th...

After two crashes that required some minor repairs, and with only 7 minutes of actual flying time on the clock, I could finally fly my Tundra again after exchanging the propeller for a plastic one (as opposed to the original Carbon fiber version). There were still 10 days left of my summer vacation, so I had good hopes to be able to learn to fly some more in the following week-and-a-half. I limit myself to early mornings, and evenings just before sunset for two reasons: there's hardly any wind, and hardly any people around. After a couple of slow circuits with flaps 1, my confidence grew. I decided to try one with flaps 0. It all looked pretty much like I was in control. The plane flew a lot faster, but I keept altitude and directional control. Or at least, so I thought... When on base leg, ready to turn final, I suddenly lost sight of my plane! It had dissappeared behind trees i thought it would be in front of. So all i could do is level my wings as best i could (withou...

Meanwhile (while I was working on my S500 homebuilt quadcopter), I joined a Dutch drone forum that had just started: www.dronepilots.nl. After a while, they organised a price draw of one of the drones they had received for a review. And guess what? I won! 😃 It's a GDU Byrd, formerly known as ProDrone Byrd. I won one with the old ProDrone logo still on it. It's a full size foldable drone, with a modular gimbal system. Mine came with the standard 1080p camera. It has a holder for a phone or tablet on the controller, and after the accompanying app connects to the controller's WiFi, you get pretty much all the functionality you'd expect from a drone capable of autonomius flight: auto take-off, auto land, GPS and baro assisted position hold, (auto) return to home, waipoint missions, video and photography remote control, etc. Full resolution video is stored on an SD card inside the camera, and (if you indicate that in options) a lower resolution version on the mobile d...

I I wanted to prove to myself that I could program an Arduino Development board to function as a flight controller. Pretty much the same algorithm can be used to control a camera gimbal to keep an action cam steady on a wobbling quadcopter. But since I got the quadcopter to fly already, I did not feel the need to prove myself all over again. So I just bought myself a  HAKRC 3-axis Gimbal  to put my cheap action cam upon. I have a more expensive Drift HD Ghost, but that one weighs about 200 grams, while my cheap no-name GoPro clone only weighs 56 grams... S the choice is simple. It will not render super quality images, with 1080p at a very high compression rate, but it will give a nice idea of the possibilities. But, just simply spending money on a gimbal doesn't get you there. There's a whole brunch of parameters you can play with to get the response you want from each of the three axes. It is hugely important to make sure your action cam sits on the gimbal in perfect b...

Bigger frame, bigger arms means longer wires. It' soldering time again! I gave the motors bullet connectors, and I want to re-use the motors as-is. So with the ESCs further out towards the ends of the arms, I needed longer wires from the main board to the ESCs. Put some bullet connectors on them as well. Gotta love Modular designs 😃 The signal wires leading from the Arduino board to the ESCs needed to get longer too, of course. I used a bit of RGB LED wire (Red, Green, Blue, and black), mounted a pi header to one end, and connected the white ESC signal wires in order to the RGB cable. Note the black rings around the white wires? That are small pieces of black shrink tube to number the wires according to the motor number they are connected to. Simple, but effective! The top plate looks like this, now. Note that the Arduino board now is mounted upside down, to protect it's electronics a little better when I crash again. And crashing I did... Mid-hover, the quad just flipped upsi...

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,...

Besides my blog on personal flying, I hereby also start a blog on my unmanned flying experiences. See  https://ericjesppl.blogspot.com/  for my "real life" flying blog(s) This is to separate the two somewhat, since there are people that prefer to follow my "real life" flying adventures, but are not so much interested in building and flying quadcopters and model airplanes. And I have shared so many stories about my model flying on so many channels (forums, Facebook, YouTube), that I decided to put it all inone place so I can refer to posts in this blog instead of type it all over again on a different channel. So this blog is all about unmanned flying in all it's aspects. I'll report on the building process of my self-built multicopters. Self-built quadcopter Also, I fly a regular, commecially available drone, GDU Byrd Standard and a model airplane Hobby King Durafly Tundra And there will be more as time progresses :) This blog will be on...