Grab and go FPV

[RTRyder]

As part of my recent MK FPV quad project I've been upgrading all my video gear and with the newfound freedom of video goggles with built in RX I decided to put together a grab and go FPV rig that requires minimal gear to get in the air. What I did was soft mount both an SN 777 camera with an Immersion 100 mw TX and cloverleaf antenna on my DJI F450 with Naza controller. The F450 along with the JR 11X and Fatshark dominator goggles are all I need for basic FPV, well that and a couple charged batteries but you get the idea.

So here's the total of what I need to bring along, makes it quick and easy to get out and do a little FPV flying without having to lug a bunch of gear, if I want to get more involved I have the MK quad with OSD and some other goodies that requires bringing along more "stuff"...

F 450 plus Dominator goggles the basic FPV gear...

A closer look at the goggles with Bluebeam antenna, I also have the shorter version that mounts straight out from the front, tested it this morning and it seems to work just as well as the right angle mast antenna...

The Dominator carrying case, about time they included something like this...

A look at the camera on the front of the F450, held on by double sided super sticky servo tape and a couple small tywraps for good measure, solid enough to not be bouncing all over in flight and soft enough to break free in the event of an encounter with mother earth, hopefully preventing damage to the camera...

The Immersion video TX, I was a bit surprised to find the 100 mw unit is substantially larger than the 600 mw unit I have on the MK quad. The power is via a cable soldered to the connection points on the DJI lower frame plate through a JST connector set so I can unplug and swap the TX to another multi without having to desolder anything. Just as on the MK FPV quad it has the Bluebeam clover leaf antenna, the difference between the old 200 mw cheapo system with rubber duck antennas and this system is night and day, crisp super clear video and it records far better over a downlink as well. The antennas alone made a big improvement on the old gear, with the new electronics the system is huge step up from what I had before...

Everyting has been debugged and thoroughly tested, tomorrow AM I'm off to the flying field to try out the new gear where I have plenty of room to play, video to be posted afterward.

Ken

 

[DucktileMedia]

I'm curious what kind of distance you get with that. I have a 250mw stinger and I am getting about 200 feet. This is a HUGE improvement over the 10-20' I was getting when the antennas were pointed horizontally instead of vertically.

 

[RTRyder]

I'm curious what kind of distance you get with that. I have a 250mw stinger and I am getting about 200 feet. This is a HUGE improvement over the 10-20' I was getting when the antennas were pointed horizontally instead of vertically.

I'll find out tomorrow, I'll be in an open field with a good half mile or more of LOS to fly in. I also have some right angle adaptors and shorter antennas to try if I find this setup doesn't work as well as I'd like. Not looking for a lot of range on this one, I'd be happy to get a few hundred feet of good reception, I was getting far more than that with the old 200 mw 5.8 system. The battery life on this setup isn't enough to get too far away so I'll be staying fairly close, might try squeezing all of it onto the F330 frame next time around, that would be a nice small area FPV quad if it works.

Ken

 

[kloner]

my guess is the 2.4 spektrum if that's a park model 6100 will do 1500-1800 feet. keep your back to the craft when you reach out so you can turn around and improve signal to get it out of failsafe

Your antenna placement is almost the same as what i started with. it got a ton of junk testing it around the house. When i stretched out the antenna with an extension and a short mast, it dramaticaly cleaned up the junk. seemed you get stuck inside the props and motors los or it has something to do with being in the fresnel zone. whatever it was, turning the rx upright with the same setup you show there made mine much better, that was what made me go the route i did with the mast and extension. just bring some zip ties and try it if it sucks like this. any angle sucks in the mast, straight up is best. That battery is huge...... i run 3000mah 4s and they went 10 minutes with these motors, with a 2000 foot range i went by myself 5-8 times a flight.

the video range should go at least a thousand feet if not more

I'm also building a 330 fpv, but it's getting dragonlink with the rest of my junk and staying 5.8 vid on everything now i'm tracking with an rhcp canon. the 330 s a really steady platform and extremely resonable to crash compared to my 450. props are less, arms are less, etc.

 

[Kilby]

I'm running a very simular set up. I've got my F450 with FlyCam 925's controlled by an OpenPilot CC board. I'm using the original FatShark goggles with the built in 5.8ghz. I keep it charged during the week and take FPV lunch breaks when the weather is working.

I bumped up to the new 600 mw vtx (the new 2012 version) and had my range improved, but I still don't think i'm getting what I should be. Today I loged 425 feet before I ran out of field, but you could tell I wouldn't have got much more than that. My cloverleaf is extended off the back about 12 inches as well.

 

[Lifter]

As part of my recent MK FPV quad project I've been upgrading all my video gear and with the newfound freedom of video goggles with built in RX I decided to put together a grab and go FPV rig that requires minimal gear to get in the air. What I did was soft mount both an SN 777 camera with an Immersion 100 mw TX and cloverleaf antenna on my DJI F450 with Naza controller. The F450 along with the JR 11X and Fatshark dominator goggles are all I need for basic FPV, well that and a couple charged batteries but you get the idea.

So here's the total of what I need to bring along, makes it quick and easy to get out and do a little FPV flying without having to lug a bunch of gear, if I want to get more involved I have the MK quad with OSD and some other goodies that requires bringing along more "stuff"...

F 450 plus Dominator goggles the basic FPV gear...

Nice and clean looking Ken, How are you powering the FS Dominators, its own battery or from the JR ??
Cheers

 

[kloner]

that 5.8 600 just with cloverleafs and internal rx i've gone 2200 feet over and over with just a little junk towards the end but alot of failsafe getting there and getting back out. that orientation the 2.4 ant is positioned is definately the best.

 

[RTRyder]

The little F450 flew well and the video gear worked pretty good as well. I do need to do some more work with the antenna setup as it seems to get blocked by the bulk of the frame in some orientations but the ground station doing the recording seems to be more affected than the video in the goggles. The 450 was the first flight of the day, after that I did a few flights with the MK quad as I wanted to test out the 600mw setup with OSD. The clarity and color with the new setup is vastly better than the cheapo Foxtech 5.8 setup it replaces and the range is much better.

Unfortunately on flight #4 something went seriously fubar and this was the result...

I had just taken off and was climbing through about 150 feet or so when the altitude started dropping quickly. I maxxed the throttle but realized that I had no control response although I could see the motors still spinning in the video. Even though it came down in the open area it still took a while to find as apparently with the motors still spinning at some speed and the wind that had come up were sufficent to keep it on a bit of a glide path until it clipped top of a dirt pile and after that it tumbled landing on the dome which did its job protecting the electronics. GoPro got thrown off and the memory card ejected. I did find the card but after I managed to recover the corrupted file so it would play I have only had about 1/2 the actual flight so I couldn't see what went on from loss of control onward from the camera point of view.

I had a memory card logging data in the MK Navi card, I've looked at the logs and see nothing unusual and no error codes until after it hit the ground and it tried to restart stalled motors. I'll dig deeper into the data to see if I missed something but so far it doesn't appear to have logged anything that would indicate a problem. System was also setup with failsafe and RTH so had it been a loss of signal it should have stopped and headed for home, that and the fact I had just flown through the same area three times previously with no problems leads me to believe it wasn't a loss of signal, plus it's setup with multiple receivers on a diversity board so it would be difficult to get it in an orientation that blocked the signal from the TX.

So far from a visual assessment it looks like 4 arms, a motor or two, some frame hardware, a set of props and the dome, other than the dome I have all the parts on hand to rebuild it with. I haven't yet connected a battery to see how well the electronics survived, later today I'll desolder the motors and connect a laptop to the stack to see if it all shows green in MKtool.


For now I'll move all the FV gear over to the bigger WKM quad until I can find time to patch the MK back together.

Ken

 

[kloner]

ouch, that ground looks hard. yea, the getting blocked thing was what was mentioning. Straight up is best, like a wkm sattelite, just a tad higher. I keep dropping mine down trying to find a height that's not in the way transorting but works good. i'm down to 6.5" from the top plate to the top of the cloverleaf

you mentioned it had rth, is that an MK thing or is it the eagle tree osd RTH?

 

[RTRyder]

ouch, that ground looks hard. yea, the getting blocked thing was what was mentioning. Straight up is best, like a wkm sattelite, just a tad higher. I keep dropping mine down trying to find a height that's not in the way transorting but works good. i'm down to 6.5" from the top plate to the top of the cloverleaf

you mentioned it had rth, is that an MK thing or is it the eagle tree osd RTH?

Mk has always had RTH via TX switch but now it's configurable in the firmware to do it automatically after loss of signal, a response to the WKM being able to do it I guess. The ground in the picture isn't where it landed, that's just the road where I parked the car, the quad actually landed on some packed gravel a couple hundred yards away behind a large pile of dirt.

I was just looking at the flight data again and I can see where it starts to lose altitude even though the throttle setting hasn't changed. I can then see where I increased throttle with no change in altitude loss. Shortly after that I can see where I just dropped the throttle completely and centered the sticks, having no control response I hoped it would just come down where I could find it rather than wind up in the woods where it would be much more difficult if not impossible to locate. Funny thing is the flight controller saw the commands from the TX, it just didn't respond to them, makes me think I hit a bug in the firmware somehow. It is after all a new release and MK has had some issues with bugs in the firmware...

 

[Kilby]

that 5.8 600 just with cloverleafs and internal rx i've gone 2200 feet over and over with just a little junk towards the end but alot of failsafe getting there and getting back out. that orientation the 2.4 ant is positioned is definately the best.

kloner, I think I need to pick your brain one day about what I might be doing wrong. I went out yesterday and was able to get 500 feet max with that set up. At this point, I've changed every single piece of the puzzle at one point or another, but can't seem to get anywhere near that range.

 

[kloner]

I wasn't feeling comftorable with my setup till i posted here and rc nut responded, i saw his antennas sticking up over the rotors and all i changed was that. had it decent here, but after i got away from town and all the interferrence, it was crystal clear out to the limits of my 2.4 tx. after my first trip i came home and ordered dragon link, tracker and canon, but the dragon links still "in the mail.

Try your antenas like this by either getting an extension or stick the vtx up on end at your own risk

I'm about half that high now. it sits in my boat, dogs kick it, i get the piece out of the arm and stick it back in........ the wavelength of 5.8 is 2.33333333", with that theory try getting the top of the antenana 2.33333" up over the rest of the craft or in segments of .5 wavelength like 3.5", 4.66", etc primarily over the 2.4 antennas but over the frame is probably about what they radiate. That's fresnal zone your antenas are most likely in

The other thing that really cleaned up my act was making every cable to the exact length and i twisted most of it, put servo wire wrap over it and that cleared up little radio glitches that kept kicking on my OSD menu from not very far away. Thats glitching the rc control, getting as much of it as clean as possible gets you further and further away. i don't even use a seperate battery for the video and it's running on 4s. mine shouldnt work, but it does crazy good

I just put together a plane, got a new style immersion vtx and it has this jiggle at the top with my hero, not with the chineese cam also on it. it's always something

 

[kloner]

got to thinking and took a ruler to my quad,,,,,,, the top of the props to the top of the blue part of the ant is 4.6" up, 9.5" and 9" from the 2.4 ant's. i had tried it leaned back but it had a bunch of shaddow areas that made alot of junk. the vtx is hovering over the naza attached to the top plate in my flamewheel sandwich

 

[Kilby]

I push mine away from the frame like you, but I went straight back instead of up. I've got a small rod that pushes about 11 inches back from the center part of the frame and the antenna rides that length before coming off the very end. I'll post a photo when I get home.

I had the same idea with my x650, but I ran the antenna out and down. I thought that it would be best served underneath instead of over top, but maybe that's wrong. I'll take a few photos later and see what others think.

-Terry

 

[kloner]

i tried down too, but with yuris legs and i couldn't get the antenna under the legs and got shaddowed from them. half the key is getting direct LOS always. i've lost signal not far away crashing, it was the smallest branch between me and it that junked it out. i didn't even know it flipped when it hit the ground till watching the video

 

[Jessestr]

Any progress?

Sorry to bump, just curious!