Hoverfly OSD

[RTRyder]

Until I got the Hoverfly quad in the air I never used an OSD. Granted the OSD functionality on the HF board is pretty minimal at the moment but it's nice to have battery voltage and altitude visible when flying FPV. A couple times I've found myself amazed to see the altitude at 200 feet or more, it's really hard to judge things like that when flying with tthe goggles on.

The next firmware release for the Hoverfly board should have some OSD enhancments and as soon as they release the GPS module there will be even more. Once I get the new release I'll record a flight and post it here for comparison to some of the better more established OSD products out there. For a feature that's embedded in the board at no extra cost it does fairly well though it's not up to the standards of something like and EPI board.

Ken

 

[Bartman]

whatever happened to the Altastation project? wasn't that a cheap full feature OSD that worked well?

 

[RTRyder]

I've heard of ALtastation but don't know much of anything about it, time to so some research!

I like the idea of having the OSD integrated into the flight controller as part of the whole package rather than having to add another board into the limited space available in the electroncis enclosure. Right now I'd have a hard time fitting another board into the MK stack in the Droidworx frame and stiil get the dome on, there really isn't anyplace else to put more electronic gear without making it look like it's been tacked on which it would be.

Ken

 

[Bartman]

ken,
cut a hole in the top then put three or four little supports at the edge of the cutout and glue the piece you removed onto the supports. i saw it mentioned somewhere to allow airflow through the center body if doing any heavy lifting. or you could do a custom dome with a vacuum forming machine in your spare time now that we've slowed down the spammers!

 

[RTRyder]

Spare time, what's that? Between work, never ending rounds of snowfall I have to remove from the driveway, and a laundry list of things I'm tweaking on the Hexa, I have no spare time...

I will say this, I am NOT adding anything else to the Hexa, if I do I'll have to convert it to a heavy lifter just to get off the ground!

Ken

 

[Droider]

Hi Ken.. what weight is your hexa with out a camera but with your preferred flight battery set up ?

Dave

 

[RTRyder]

Hi Ken.. what weight is your hexa with out a camera but with your preferred flight battery set up ?

Dave

I was quite surprised to find the all up weight of the Hexa to be a hair over 6 pounds with everything mounted and a pair of Hyperion 4S 5000 packs. Subtract the weight of a Gopro Hero with case and tripod mounting stand and its probably just a fraction under 6 lbs. The Stock MK frame with mkTR mount was roughly 5 1/2 lbs, so all that alloy in the Pro Mini mount does make a difference. If I were going to try and fly with something like a Canon 550 on the mount I'd have to either slim it down some or upgrade the motors to heavy lifters with bigger props and sacrifice some flight time in the process.

I tried to fly it with a pair of 4S packs in parallel and at almost 7 1/2 lbs it wasn't having any of that, hover was about 3/4 throttle!

Ken

 

[Droider]

Hi Ken.. hows the snow!?

I am home for the weekend so I will start weighing stuff and hopefully thanks to Redhotpearl for his help I will be flying with GPS, PH AH Home and what ever else I can program!

Once I get comfortable with the set up I will start experimenting with weights to see what I can practically fly with

Dave

 

[RTRyder]

Hi Ken.. hows the snow!?

I am home for the weekend so I will start weighing stuff and hopefully thanks to Redhotpearl for his help I will be flying with GPS, PH AH Home and what ever else I can program!

Once I get comfortable with the set up I will start experimenting with weights to see what I can practically fly with

Dave

The snow is doing well, we've officially had 5 feet of the stuff in the last 30 days and it's not done yet, rumor has it we'll get another foot this week... SIGH... this is getting old...

At least I have a lot of time to work on the multi's in between rounds of moving snow around outside, the Hoverfly rebuild is finished, for now. Yesterday the new dome arrived so it has its own now and the Droidworx got it's dome back. Last night I removed the HiSight II mount and swapped the anemic analog servos for a set of HiTec 5065MG digitals, BIG difference in the tilt and roll compensation with those on there. Did a couple test flights out in the yard today and its really night and day in the results, now if the folks at Hoverfly would finish tweaking the next firmware release and get it out the door maybe some of the nagging little things like the mount not leveling right and the twitchy servo response would go away.

I'm also hoping some of the promised fixes and updates to the OSD make it in this release as well. Still no GPS or position hold though and the altitude hold still needs work but it does keep it near to where you set it even if it does start doing yoyo imitations once its locked on.

Ken