Drone parts on fixed wing

[hogtownjon]

Just wanted some ideas about using drone parts on a fixed wing. Have some old parts that could be used and I’m sure others have done the same. First just starting with a PDB and an ESC without BEC. And then maybe also adding a betaflight f3 board. What are others experience on the matter.
Thanks,
Jon

 

[JasonK]

if you take a look at the H-Pack, that is the Gremlin motors. It just adds a power distribution board to handle the lack of BEC on the included ESCs.

it is used on the following builds:

 

[hogtownjon]

if you take a look at the H-Pack, that is the Gremlin motors. It just adds a power distribution board to handle the lack of BEC on the included ESCs.

That is perfect. Thanks so much!

 

[hogtownjon]

How about the second part. Anyone put a quad fc on a fixed wing?

 

[JasonK]

other then the connectors (many quad FCs have a special multi ESC cable connector), the general functionality of a FC is the same, you have a IMU, a MicroController, some support bits. Then you have the software you run on it. So there are a few challenges that might come up:

• Lack of Servo output pins (this is the only 'can't make it work' situation I can think of)
• Needing to install different firmware/configuring the current firmware to support the fixed wing behavior (given the multiple different flight controller open source projects out there, the only reason this would be if you couldn't find one that both supports your flight controller and the fixed wing flight mode.)
• Various connetion/hookup/related issues not already specified.

 

[PsyBorg]

They did this a long time ago. I would think you could scale up the plane and go 3, 4 or super size with 5 inch quads on a foamie build. I think they even tell how to set the motors up to where they act like differential yaw instead of odd corner quad mode where yaw would actually twist the plane on roll axis. Maybe they just used roll mapped to yaw channel stick on radio. Been a while since I watched it.

As far as servos Betaflight has the ability to map servos to open ports. It even has a dedicated servo tab to set them up if you enable the expert mode button to open up other hidden tabs.

 

[LitterBug]

I have not had favorable results with the BetaFlight F3 board and iNav. Not sure if it was a problem with the specific version of iNav, F3 being on the verge of obsolecense, or some issue with the board. I'm not entirely sold on iNav either and prefer to run ArduPilot. I have a few quad boards that are capable of running ArduPlane and need to play a bit more with them.

Cheers!
LitterBug

 

[hogtownjon]

Thanks so much! That’s exactly what I was looking for. Didn’t know about iNav or ArduPilot so will definitely be trying it out.

 

[LitterBug]

I have this thread https://forum.flitetest.com/index.p...ra5-ardupilot-fc-enabled-wingy-thingys.53689/ where I have been documenting some of my adventures.

LB