Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Arduino Powered F-550 Hexacopter my biggest drone yet!

I am currently upgrading my F-450 QuadCopter to a F-550 HexaCopter.  Besides buying the frame I bought two additional motors and ESC's.  So far I have all the motors working and am getting close to having it ready to fly.  The frame kit comes with two bags of screws but no instructions.

It is assembled much like the F-450, you solder the ESC's to the base then assemble the legs to the base.  Note that the power connections to the battery are the opposite of the ESC's power connections.

The top piece does not have the holes for mounting the flight controller.  I think they wanted the controller to be mounted on the bottom piece.  The holes in the bottom piece fit a KK Controller nicely.  I tried several other controllers and they all failed to work properly.  Finally I tried a KK controller with LCD and it works almost every time.  Sometimes I need to re-calibrate the gyros.




Wednesday, June 14, 2017

ZMR250 or QAV250 Racing 250mm QuadCopter

I am building a ZMR250 quadcopter.  It came as a frame kit and I added the ESC (Electronic Speed Control) and Motors.


It did not come with a lot of instructions but I managed to get it together but not working.
This is what it looks like assembled with a MultiWii controller.  I had to countersink the propellers because otherwise there is not enough threads to get the top nut on.
The problem now is that only two of the four motors spins up.  I replaced a motor and now suspect it is the ESC's that are defective.  

After replacing one of the ESC's then calibrating all of them it was ready to fly.  But it would not even lift off the ground.  They are 1000 KV motors and they should have been 2000 KV motors!  The RPM is not high enough to lift the quad off the ground!


Tuesday, June 13, 2017

2017 Chaffee NY Hamfest

Sorry I did not take a lot of pictures.  This is still a smaller Hamfest.  I took along some broken big screen TV's as well as a 3D printer but did not sell much of anything.

The biggest problem was that the shutter button broke on my camera.  I had to use a pen to take pictures!