Oh boy...
My latest quad (a spider style electrohub) has been a learning experience for me lately. I'm used to flying things with auto-leveling which I haven't bothered to enable on this yet, mostly due to wanting to get some real flying chops that don't rely on software to make me look good. Also not being able to find the software for Mac (as the link on RTF quads is dead) has been a contributor.
Over the past couple of weeks I've had a few crashes, mostly resulting in broken booms. It's gotten to a point where I feel totally comfortable flying around, banking in corners, negotiating out of any near-crashes etc etc. I can fly as fast as I can around the farm with ease. It's been great. I was comfortable enough that I built a little GoPro mount for and took it up for some video.
The video came out nice. It's cloudy but you can see some New Zealand countryside (this is a screengrab).
The problem came on my fourth flight session for the day. I went up a little higher than I was comfortable with, but I figured it'd be fine. The wind caught it, so I slowly backed it back towards me and started bringing it down. Somewhere along the line I must have taken my eyes off the quad for a second and it must have flipped upside down (I must have been over-eager on bringing it back and rolled over). I only had the smallest amount of throttle on as it was coming down, so it was pretty much free-falling (which doesn't get very fast with these).
So of course when I got pretty close to the ground, I hit the throttle to slow it down, which instead sent it speeding downwards.
I realized and tried for a flip... but there wasn't enough time.
It broke three props, all four booms, ripped the wires out of a couple of the ESCs and off the Electrohub board... not good.
This was a baaaad crash. I've re-soldered everything up but don't have props (or the correct sized booms). I made up a whole bunch which are 10mm... but they're far too skinny so I'm going to go up to 12 or 15. That combined with not having props means I'm not likely going to be flying for a while (depending on if I can source any local props, otherwise I'm waiting for an order from the states).
The good news, the motors all look fine, the ECS's don't LOOK damaged... and the rest, no worries (that's the joy of building your own... it's easy to fix!).
And my GoPro... lets just not talk about that
lucky it was only an entry level one.
My latest quad (a spider style electrohub) has been a learning experience for me lately. I'm used to flying things with auto-leveling which I haven't bothered to enable on this yet, mostly due to wanting to get some real flying chops that don't rely on software to make me look good. Also not being able to find the software for Mac (as the link on RTF quads is dead) has been a contributor.
Over the past couple of weeks I've had a few crashes, mostly resulting in broken booms. It's gotten to a point where I feel totally comfortable flying around, banking in corners, negotiating out of any near-crashes etc etc. I can fly as fast as I can around the farm with ease. It's been great. I was comfortable enough that I built a little GoPro mount for and took it up for some video.
The video came out nice. It's cloudy but you can see some New Zealand countryside (this is a screengrab).
The problem came on my fourth flight session for the day. I went up a little higher than I was comfortable with, but I figured it'd be fine. The wind caught it, so I slowly backed it back towards me and started bringing it down. Somewhere along the line I must have taken my eyes off the quad for a second and it must have flipped upside down (I must have been over-eager on bringing it back and rolled over). I only had the smallest amount of throttle on as it was coming down, so it was pretty much free-falling (which doesn't get very fast with these).
So of course when I got pretty close to the ground, I hit the throttle to slow it down, which instead sent it speeding downwards.
I realized and tried for a flip... but there wasn't enough time.
It broke three props, all four booms, ripped the wires out of a couple of the ESCs and off the Electrohub board... not good.
This was a baaaad crash. I've re-soldered everything up but don't have props (or the correct sized booms). I made up a whole bunch which are 10mm... but they're far too skinny so I'm going to go up to 12 or 15. That combined with not having props means I'm not likely going to be flying for a while (depending on if I can source any local props, otherwise I'm waiting for an order from the states).
The good news, the motors all look fine, the ECS's don't LOOK damaged... and the rest, no worries (that's the joy of building your own... it's easy to fix!).
And my GoPro... lets just not talk about that
lucky it was only an entry level one.
