MultiWii / NAZE / SP Racing F3 Your thoughts on Arducopter

Gunter

Gunter

Draganflyer X4
I am planning a big build soon, thinking about Arducopter hexa, because of the horrible price of the MK gear. Arducopter have all the features that I need, for half the price...and MK want an extra £900 if I want to go commercial.

The plan is to build a standard Ardu 6 rotor, then after it's flying and set up properly, buy a droidworx hexa frame and rebuild it with slightly better motors and blades.

Please let me know what you think of the Arducopter kit, how reliable is it, etc etc.
 

W

Wayne Jones

Member
Gunter,
I have the Aducopter board, Xbee, Gps but instead of buying the RTF system I bought just the electronics. I hear good things about it but there is a learning curve for adjustments. If I were to do it again I would buy the RTF version from JDrones an just transfer the electronics. I did not want to test it on my Droidworx frame so I bought a Gaui quad. The set up was too involved for my time frame and I bought the Hoverfly Pro because of ease of use. If I work on my Arducopter this weekend I will let you know how it goes
 

K

koolkiwikat

Member
Once you go Arducopter...you wont go back, support is huge driven by switched on programmers and helpful users, yes there is some tinkering but its great to learn how it all works and its really not that hard compared to over a year ago....
 

Gunter

Gunter

Draganflyer X4
Thanks for the replies. My advantage is that I have a UK distributor (buildyourowndrone.co.uk) in my neighbourhood and he's always got spares - so anything I need is literally 1/2 mile away.
 

R

ryan_m

Member
koolkiwikat said:
Once you go Arducopter...you wont go back, support is huge driven by switched on programmers and helpful users, yes there is some tinkering but its great to learn how it all works and its really not that hard compared to over a year ago....
Click to expand...

Where is the best place to get support on the arducopter stuff? I got mine flying just recently as a Y3 on arducopter. Had a crash today and I think I didn't have enough control authority. Also it seemed like the 'neutral' point or level point of the accelerometers got off. It was a windy day and I was holding about 2/3 stick correction just to keep it stationary. Then I couldn't get it to come back to me. I need more elevator/pitch authority I think. And I wondered about the leveling thing... So then I switched on return to launch, and it was unable to make it back to me, was holding position, but couldn't get back. When I went back to stabilize mode it tipped about 30 degrees on it's own. That's when I tried fighting it and it was taking full elevator to hold position in the wind. When I let go of the sticks again it tipped wildly. Wound up crashing pretty hard. Hopefully the electronics survived intact. Haven't had the chance to check them out just yet though.
 

plingboot

plingboot

Member
best place for support is diydrones.com which is pretty much the home of arducopter.

@gunter, having seen your wookong in the air, i think you might be a bit underwhelmed by the arducopter, i'd be surprised if you can quickly dial it in to be as stable.
 
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kevinv033

kevinv033

Member
Ryan, diydrones.com is definitely the place to ask. Make sure you go into the Arducopter discussion group. Ask your questions there. Lots of helpful people. In the future I would set up an acro or rate mode so you can rely on just flying by gyro if you get into a sketchy situation like that.

I've run into that problem on a tricopter too...I did t have an acro mode setup...I took arducopter out after the crash and it's now on a y6. Do you know what firmware you were running?
 

R

ryan_m

Member
Didn't realize diydrones had a forum, I've signed up, awaiting approval there. Will post there. I had my FC hard mounted using standoffs, it appears this might have been part of the problem, the vibes overwhelming the FC's accelerometers. This thread:
http://www.diydrones.com/forum/topics/sticks-of-centre-after-fllying
similar problem to what I had, not enough control authority after flying a few minutes.
I guess mounting it via double sided sticky foam tape is the way to go? Makes sense, it's what we do on traditional heli gyros...
Will also look into an acro mode setup. It's saved my XAircraft X650 a few times :)
I didn't see that as one of the built in modes in the Mission Planner software that I used to setup the APM board though. Must research how to do that.
Also, is there log data available that might shed some light on the crash? I saw a few other posts about log data, I haven't much experience with the APM. Will go dig looking for that in a few...
 

kevinv033

kevinv033

Member
Ryan,

Yep. Foam tape is the way to go. I use the same stuff from heli gyros too. There's an acro mode in the flight mode setup drop downs, maybe you have an earlier version o mission planner?
 

R

ryan_m

Member
latest one, must have just missed it. Figures...
I would like more flight modes though, would love to be able to pick more than three. Have a 9303, must figure that out...
 


R

ryan_m

Member
Thanks, I had seen that earlier when setting mine up, but didn't think at the time I needed more than 3 modes. I was going to go back and find it, but that saved me the trouble :)
 

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