Hoverfly Pro gets a new frame

RTRyder

Merlin of Multirotors
We're having a particularly bad winter here in the northeastern USA, since the day after Christmas we've had 4 feet off snow dumped on us with the threat of even more to come in the next couple of days and now the outside temperatures have dipped down to the single digits on the Farenheit scale!

Don't know about anyone else but I'm starting to get a case of cabin fever not being able to get out and about that much, and flying is impractical when your fingers freeze up in a mater of a minute or two outside. So to keep what little sanity I have left these days I've been putting the finishing touches on the Droidworx AD-6 MK Hexa and that's pretty much done now, so time to get a new project on the bench.

I was one of the early adopters of the new Hoverfly Pro board and since its arrival it has been housed in one of Jakub's frames that I had originally built with a KK controller for sport flying...

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The Hoverfly Pro board was designed primarily for A/P/V applications with a completely new architecture incorporating auto leveling via accelerometers, altitude hold, and built in OSD. My original intention was to build it up as a backup to the MK for doing A/P work and it would have looked something like this...

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Unfortunately like all things new to market, the Hoverfly board had a few issues on release, most of them having to do with bugs in the firmware. The biggest problem that quickly surfaced as more and more boards took to the air was a problem with flipping and falling out of the sky for no apparent reason, here's the end result of one of my experiences with that little glitch...

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Fortunately for my equipment I found out about the problem early on by being one of the first customers to get a board up and flying, so I never tried to fly it with a camera mount and camera attached. Instead I decided to make it into a dedicated FPV platform until things stabilized with the software and it became reliable enough to carry camera gear. A few releases of firmware later and the flipping problem seems to be taken care of, so it's time to put the Hoverfly board into a better frame and explore what it's capable of. Having a couple shelves full of spare multirotor bits here I started digging around to see if I had anything suitable to swap the HF gear into and last night I came up with something I think is going to be just right but you'll have to wait for the next installment to find out what that is...;)

Ken
 
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RTRyder

Merlin of Multirotors
Except for a couple minor details, its done and has been test flown, and I must say it flys a lot better in this configuration than it did in the old KK quad frame. I reconfigured the stock MK Hexa frame leftover from the conversion of the Hexa to a Droidworx frame into a quad setup that is actually a good 50 mm or more smaller than the KK frame is. The difference in control response is quite noticeable in the smaller frame and the taller landing gear gives it more of a presence in the air. The goal was first of all to use whatever I had on hand in this project and second to build a platform that could handle a camera mount to use as a backup for the Droidworx MK, the stock Mk frame and old HiSight II mount fit both categories, so here's what I wound up with...

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I did the first flight test last evening around 9:30 PM in the street in front of the house. There's two strips of blue LEDs on the front arms and a bit of florescent spiral wrap on the front ends of the landing skids, the light from the LEDs made the spiral wrap glow in the dark. It was actually a lot of fun and I would have flown a few more times were it not about 20 degrees F at the time and my fingers totally numb by the time the first set of packs ran down.

This morning I got in the first test flight with a camera attached to the mount, the video is uploading now and I'll post the link to that in a bit.

Still remaining to be done is a better placement for the RX and two satellites as well as a place to mount the FPV TX and installing the wiring harness for the FPV and OSD connections. The dome is temporarily on loan from the Droidworx MK until the new one I bought arrives to replace it on this frame, the Droidworx is currently wearing its stock clear dome while it sits on the shelf.

Ken

Here's the link to the video...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTGGtaH4ggc
 
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