Gday Chris,
All of my batteries I've sourced from Hobbyking, so I've gone down the XT60 connector path. I recently soldered together three connectors to parallel two of my 2200's 3S to give me 4400 mAh. Haven't tried it out yet, but it's worked out well as far as counter balancing the new camera gimbal is concerned.
I'm looking forward to playing around with the waypoint navigation software that talks to the multiwii board via bluetooth. It will be interesting to see how far the bluetooth reception is.
Cheers, Marschy
Hi Marschy,
Got most of my stuff off Hobby King too. I now have worked out why I was breaking props so often..... Turns out the black props I bought were carbon mixed, nice and light but not good for learning to fly a tricopter. I also settled on the XT60 connector for my power. It was a challenge to solder 3 x 16AWG + 1 x 18 AWG to the XT60 connector but I got there. Bundled them together before hand and used some thin copper winding wire to bind them together.
Dont expect to much from Bluetooth, you'll get maybe 15-20m at best, otherwise it isnt following the bluetooth standard, your more likely to get around 10m range.
Last nights test flight went really well, luckily the playing field had all the lights on for me in the light rain (thankful that I have the hard case KK2 board and that the regular soccer games weren't on). I used some thread lock on my motors earlier in the night and undid some of the cables, thought I put them back in the right order, sigh...... Double check it if you unplug it.... I flipped it on first attempt (motor 1 and 3 were swapped over), reassessed the wiring and it was all good from there. Had it on two flights, total flight time was around 9 mins and the battery (3s - 2200mAH) was only down to 11.5 so I'm very happy with that. I was just hovering and some flying patterns, so I expect that to reduce once I start to use it a bit more. The self level feature seems pretty good, I tested it out a couple of times to see how good it was.
Was about to head up a 2nd time after I finished supervising an activity but they turned the lights off just as I was about to walk up to the park :-(
On a plus, since I'm using the plastic props now I'm not breaking them!!!! Damn carbon mixed props...... Was wondering why only the rear prop was breaking on each crash..... Was getting annoyed at how fast they were dying.
Still finding it very sensitive on the throttle (about 50% to take off, so really I'm using the top half of the stick, doesnt make for the best control), thinking of using some stick scaling or switching to heli mode to use a throttle curve, to make it a bit less sensitive. I was wrong earlier, I didnt have expo on the throttle as I first thought I had.
I've also been reading up on tuning the P and I values. I think it's pretty stable at present so might leave those for the time being until I'm more comfortable with it.
I'll do one more test flight tonight and then I'll work out how to attach the camera, so I'll see if I can post some footage after the weekend.
On a side note, it sure does draw a crowd. Not want I wanted last night, as I'm still getting used to it. Everyone seems to want to know more about it. On a plus not one person was against them, saw it as something fun and cool. They cant believe how inexpensive it was to build either.
I like the look of the MultiWii FC, I'll give it a bit more of a look in a few months. I like the GPS and barometer stuff that can be easily integrated.
