CranialRectosis' Alien 4" Build

cranialrectosis

Faster than a speeding face plant!
Mentor
DYS motors got here today.

Time to heat up the soldering iron!

Unfortunately, these come in CW and CCW pairs. I freaking hate that but it's how these are sold. Still, if the most difficult thing I have to do to fix this is figure out where these reverse thread motors go so I don't spin my props off when I arm, I call that a win! :)
 

cranialrectosis

Faster than a speeding face plant!
Mentor
The new motors add 3 grams probably due to the prop nuts.

I can't use the nice purple Alien prop nuts because of the CW CCW pairing. Otherwise these motors spin up just fine and I get another 200kv. I'll have to re-tune the copter but dRonin makes that simple.

The new motors also came with 2mm bullets (bullets on an 1806??) and 5mm and 7mm M3 motor mounting screws. Lots of screws! I have enough to build 3 more copters as I will be using the purple Alien motor screws. Still its a nice touch. These motors also come with soft wire leads instead of the nasty enamel coated ones that are hard as heck to work with.

So far and before I have flown, these new motors seem to be pretty nice. They seem MUCH nicer than my old DYS 1806 2300s.

Hopefully I'll get to fly tomorrow. It's storming outside tonight.

EDIT: The difference between the DYS motors and Cobra motors is 200kv not 2000kv. Spell check doesn't catch those dum dum mistakes...
 
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jipp

Senior Member
thats pretty impressive kv for a 1806. heh i guess the extra weight comes from extra copper.
hope this fixers your issues. :D

not much here just starting to wean my self off the my opiate pain pills, and waiting for my medical green card to get hee this week.

i hope to get health and stop feeling so sick from the pain pills. will be weird getting use to going into a legal store to buy herb and looking through all there merchandise. tho. laughs.

until i get feeling better im just doing the best i can not even flown in the last 7 days.. just have felt blah last few months reason for my decision to stop the opiates and see if that helps, they not helping with pain anymore time to try something else. here is to staying healthy.
chris.

chris.
 

PsyBorg

Wake up! Time to fly!
I cant believe they rev that high. I had a chance today to almost go full throttle on 2204 2000kv motors and they made a unique sound. I wonder if all the neighborhood dogs will howl when you finally get to fire them puppies up.
 

cranialrectosis

Faster than a speeding face plant!
Mentor
I got in a quick autotune this morning. I really don't have time to fly but will later if it's not raining when I get home.

With dRonin when you autotune, you can submit your tuning profile to "autotown". This way the serious nerds can examine your numbers and provide advice. This really tells guys like icee and peabody very important things about your copter including if you have bad or poorly configured components.

With the Cobra motors I got an autotune TAU value (lower is better) between 10 and 12. Today with the new motors I hit 11.4. My hover on the Cobras was 26% on these it is 25%. I'm no Peabody but to me these numbers tell me that with the higher kv motors, the new motors have about the same punch, maybe a touch more.

My results for autotown may be found here:
http://dronin-autotown.appspot.com/at/tune/ahFzfmRyb25pbi1hdXRvdG93bnIYCxILVHVuZVJlc3VsdHMYgICAoPuErAsM

Another really nice feature of autotune is that I can see my past results including from a tune with the Cobras about 10 days prior to today so I may compare them. Pretty nice stuff this dRonin. :)
 
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jipp

Senior Member
LOL, sure baseball size hail :D that stuff looks like it would hurt. biggest iv ever experience is marble size hail and that hurt and did some damage too.
chris.
 

cranialrectosis

Faster than a speeding face plant!
Mentor
She flies! The new motors work well. Vibration is notably reduced and while the motors get warm, they are not hot.

Before the C clips fell out of my Cobras, I had ordered new props. Now that I am flying again and the new props are here, it's time to give 4" bull-nose, tri-blades a shot! My lipos and motors may hate me today. :)

Yeah, I have to retune but with dRonin, who cares? It takes about 5 minutes to get a good tune and if I don't like the triblades, who cares? I can just re-tune again!
 

jhitesma

Some guy in the desert
Mentor
Yeah, I have to retune but with dRonin, who cares? It takes about 5 minutes to get a good tune and if I don't like the triblades, who cares? I can just re-tune again!

Isn't it great? And you can actually compare tunes and see if a prop change actually gave improvements or not instead of just going on feel. (And if you're recording amp draw you can even work out the efficiency to see which props give the best performance at the highest efficiency.)

BTW - not sure if you saw or not but the next release hit yesterday:

Major changes since last release:


  • Camera tilt reprojection allows adjusting yaw and roll control to put the axis of roll rotation in the middle of a camera view. It makes flight characteristics a lot more intuitive when flying FPV with significant camera tilt.
  • Headfree mode allows "locking" roll and pitch to the yaw that the quadcopter was at when the mode was enabled. Note that this requires calibration for boards with a compass, and will (very slowly) drift on flight controllers without one.
  • Support for BrainFPV RE1 and DTFc.
  • Support for iBus and SRXL receiver protocols added.
  • Timer autoresolution: timers automatically detect the maximum count rate that they can support and use it. Oneshot is now faked when configured on CC3D with incompatible receiver protocol (PWM, PPM on pin 3).
  • Autotune usability is improved with a brand new wizard and workflow.
  • Cell-count autodetection has been added to the battery module.
  • New releases can be announced on the welcome screen.
  • Logging performance has been improved and parameters changed to support OpenLager's high data rate modes.
  • Deprecated features removed: MWRate flight mode, Throttle PID Attenuation
  • Flight efficiency improvements
  • Vibration analysis module now does the FFT computation on the GCS side
  • Various bugfixes: GCS crashes, ADC RSSI off-by-one channel error, DSM autodetection, MSP altitude display, Lux ports display
  • Preliminary support for WS2812 LEDs on BrainRE1
  • Support for IR lap transponder functionality on BrainRE1
  • Crash reporting added to Mac OS X builds
  • Quanton: USART6 added
  • USB power no longer prevents using another telemetry port or protocol

And there's already some interesting updates for the next release that will improve performance even further. Specifically yesterday they found a spot in the manual control handling that was limiting the rate updates from the RX were being read to a fixed rate instead of pulling them as soon as possible. So with serial RX's you'll get even tighter control in the future (this fix isn't in the latest release but will be in the next release and will soon be in daily builds.)

I expect we'll also see the "triflight" updates merge soon now that the devs can focus on the next release.
 

cranialrectosis

Faster than a speeding face plant!
Mentor
So I ran with the 3 blades.

Motors get hot. Its 90 outside. After the tune the motors were 111 and the TAU went from 11.4 to 24.2, the worst score I have seen since I was running a 30C 4S lipo.

I'm going to try the tune again later after it cools off. It was too bright to see outside and hotter than blazes. With the dRonin autotune, I get to choose whether or not to accept this tune and I don't think I will.

The triblades sure look and sound cool though. :)

dRonin did not upgrade. Jhitesma, when will automatic upgrades push me to the latest?
 
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jipp

Senior Member
its good to hear dronin advancing and auto-tune is working.. this is good.. what is triflite is that for tricopters?
 

cranialrectosis

Faster than a speeding face plant!
Mentor
triflite is David W magic. Its a tweak on Cleanflite that uses a wire connected to the servo that tells the FC where the servo is. It allows the FC to better control a tricopter and makes it simpler to eliminate wobbly tail rotors.

This is one of Davids new servos.
 

jhitesma

Some guy in the desert
Mentor
dRonin did not upgrade. Jhitesma, when will automatic upgrades push me to the latest?

GCS doesn't autoupgrade itself (yet there has been talk of adding that) though the new release will now tell you on the homepage when the next release is released.

Once you download and install the new GCS the first time you connect you'll get auto-upgraded on the board you connect (since the FW has to match GCS.)
 

jhitesma

Some guy in the desert
Mentor
triflite is David W magic. Its a tweak on Cleanflite that uses a wire connected to the servo that tells the FC where the servo is. It allows the FC to better control a tricopter and makes it simpler to eliminate wobbly tail rotors.

There's a bit more to it than just the feedback...but the feedback from the servo is a biggie. It's also not just David, most of it is actually a programmer who's name I forget. jihlein who made the singlecopter I'm duplicating is also working on taking the changes to CF that made triflight and bringing them into dRonin. Here's the work on it: https://github.com/d-ronin/dRonin/pull/1054
 

jipp

Senior Member
looks like by the time i get to feeling better to start working on my trifecta the triflite stuff should be implemented as i plan on using dronin. i also saw the how to add that wire to the servo. i wish HK would of recommend the correct servo so i would not have to order a new one.. you suck HK. heh.

chris.
 

cranialrectosis

Faster than a speeding face plant!
Mentor
Look at the emax mg servos too, jipp. :)

I will be rebuilding my tricopter and plan to use triflite. I'm really just deciding what electronics I want to use. I am tempted to go 4S but I still have 4 3S flight batteries and the tricopter has been my 'mellow' copter.

For the record, my 4" Alien is my moderate copter although with triblades it's a bunch more potent. I'm still on the fence on these triblades. The motors get pretty warm and I'm having a little difficulty keeping the copter in the yard. On triblades my dRonin hover goes from 25% to 21%.

One thing I love about these 4" HQ bullnose props is that they don't get broken nearly as often as 6" HQ props. Not nearly as often.

Last night I changed dRonin to put my copter on switch arming. I'm going to have to re-learn arming and disarming my copters as I plan to do this across the board. In dRonin it is simple to put arming and flight modes on one switch.

First I went into the inputs tab and set the arming function on the left side to sBus and channel 5. I gave it the same range as my flight modes function. I set the neutral at <> 1/3rd of the range for arming. Then I set the neutral for flight mode to about 50% of the total range. That all looks like this:
RCInput.jpg

Finally I went into the flight modes switch. I want two available modes. Right now I have acro and acro selected but I will use autotune and acro plus or even horizon depending on where I plan to fly.
FlightMode.jpg

dRonin settings make this simple and thanks to dsal on the IRC it was easy to find a solution.

I use the SG switch on the Taranis for arming and mode. Position 1 is disarmed, positions 2 and 3 are for acro and are easily configured in dRonin for whatever I want.
 
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jhitesma

Some guy in the desert
Mentor
I'm still adjusting to arming with a switch. Getting pretty good at remembering to arm that way but still having a hard time remembering to disarm with the switch :p

But I wanted to give hangtime a try and that's not really a good idea with stick arming so time to get used to switches.

I did keep arming on a separate switch though, I don't like having it on the same switch as mode...unless I only have one mode. When I want to disarm I want to disarm NOW not possibly have to spend a few miliseconds flipping past another mode first ;) Plus my mode switch is harder for me to hit than my disarm switch.