Quadcopter over the Cottage

quadcopter testing

With the wooden frame and no payload:

Plywood frame, about 650g, total flying weight 2160g.
8 mins flying time.

With 1240g payload, total weight 3400g, 4mins 26secs flying time.

I've found that I wasn't charging the battery fully. With my charger, I need to set it charging three times. A few minutes through the third time, it tells me it is full.

Quadcopter first flights

I built a 150g carbon fiber and plastic frame, but it broke on my first flight.

 So I made a frame from 12mm plywood, weighing 600g, plus a cardboard box taped to the bottom, as a shock absorber. I have had some fun learning to fly this; it's not so hard as I don't need to touch the yaw control, so I just have throttle, roll and pitch to worry about, like on my plane. I only got 8 minutes flying time from it.

Wingtips

I made some homemade wing tips. They definitely fix the yaw oscillations, but maybe dangerous?

Morning Flight

I did a quick flight from mum and dad's patio over the mist in the valley, this morning.

I was getting the hang of doing fast slow passes over mum and dad's house, but smacked the plane into the stone path. The camera and battery came off and landed on the grass. Nothing a bit of glue and tape won't fix. Maybe my next plane project should be a stable camera pan and tilt platform.

Lehmann Aviation

I wanted an EPP plane and I don't have much time, so I ordered a couple of moulded plane bodies from here: http://www.lehmannaviation.com/
They came from France in less than a week. They didn't have white, so I agreed to black. They cost 20 Euros each, plus 25 Euros postage.
It flies ok, but pitches up too much when I apply power.
This is made better by removing the wing tips, but makes it more unstable but more efficient.
I am ready to add some computer control, I guess, at least to try to stabilise the flight.