TriRot – First flight Tests

Post date: 18-Oct-2011 09:26:39

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to get TriRot airborne… and it’s been interesting.

My initial worry was that TriRot may be too heavy, so I trimmed off all the excess and brought the weight down from 553grams to 410grams. This included getting a smaller battery. I even turned the motors around to get rid of the prop adapters in favour of the built in prop savers. The vireo below shows why I now hate prop savers ;-)

TriRot - First Flight Test

I then spent the next week building arms that could hold my motors the other way around so that I could fit prop adapters and also support bigger props. And then I had success. TriRot lifted quite easily, just to crash about 2 seconds later… See the next Video.

TriRot - First Flight Test ... Again

Broken Props, and one arm

The problem now is that I to fix the brazing on the broken arm, I’ll have to take the motors completely out again as I will be heating them to about 600 degrees Celsius if I don’t. The plan at the moment is to fix it temporarily with cable ties or glue and work on getting TriRot to fly first. Once everything is stable, I’ll braze the mounting plate back onto the arm.

I think I know what caused the crash too. I used the z axis output from the IMU to auto correct the yaw using the servo angle. I did get some early comments saying that this was not a good idea, but I tried it anyway. Watching the video seemed to show that it was a Z-axis spin that prevented TriRot from correcting its hover, so I’ll update the code before the next test.

I’ve ordered new props last night, so hopefully they will arrive soon.

Ps. Thanks to everyone who have made various suggestions so far. Keep them coming. I need them, because as I mentioned right in the beginning, this is my first attempt at flying anything [remote controlled].