EMAX Nighthawk Pro 280 ARF

[jhitesma]

The Monkey must be working weekends Article was approved within 24 hours, fastest one I've had approved yet.

Here it is for the longer version of how to flash this board:
http://flitetest.com/articles/flashing-blheli-on-the-emax-nighthawk-pro-280

 

[Spastickitten]

The monkey never stops...

 

[thebatfink]

Hi I'm looking to add OSD to the craft and wondered if there is an existing place to draw 5v/0.5a from the board? or can I just wire it in on the radio pins along with the receiver? Thanks!

 

[jhitesma]

There isn't any dedicated 5v port that I'm aware of. You might be able to pull it off the radio pins, but that might push the regulators harder than they're designed for depending on how much current the OSD draws. They run pretty hot on 3s already (I haven't tried 4s but since they're linear regulators they'd have to run even hotter on 4s.) so I'd be careful about how much more current you draw through them. Best bet would probably be to add a pololu off one of the 12v ports.

 

[thebatfink]

Thanks. It says 0.5A (Micro OSD) but I have a couple of mini becs that are the same size as the OSD, guess I'll have to run the power through that. My only concern was what it's going to do for video interference. I'd rather not have to also add an LC Filter as it's just adding more weight and I hoped I could sneak it between the flight board and the bottom plate to keep everything looking tidy.

It's my first OSD on a Multiwii / Cleanflight. Do you know if I have VBAT connected to flight controller (I connect from the empty balance plug behind the camera to VBAT right now) - will it pass voltage information to the OSD over the UART or do I need to run another set of wires directly to the OSD battery pads as well? I'm assuming it should being as it's currently sending voltage data to my Taranis through the D4R via Soft Serial?

 

[jhitesma]

Thanks. It says 0.5A (Micro OSD) but I have a couple of mini becs that are the same size as the OSD, guess I'll have to run the power through that. My only concern was what it's going to do for video interference. I'd rather not have to also add an LC Filter as it's just adding more weight and I hoped I could sneak it between the flight board and the bottom plate to keep everything looking tidy.

May want a LC filter anyway...it's one of the things I'm surprised emax didn't include in this board. Wouldn't have added much at all to the cost and they have traces on the board for video...but then ended up using external wires instead. I'm guessing by the time they realized they needed it it was too late to fit it into production

It's my first OSD on a Multiwii / Cleanflight. Do you know if I have VBAT connected to flight controller (I connect from the empty balance plug behind the camera to VBAT right now) - will it pass voltage information to the OSD over the UART or do I need to run another set of wires directly to the OSD battery pads as well? I'm assuming it should being as it's currently sending voltage data to my Taranis through the D4R via Soft Serial?

If you run power to the vbat on the board and enable vbat in firmware then it will pass that through the UART to the OSD. There should be no need to run vbat to the OSD separately for monitoring. One of these days I need to dust off my minimOSD and hook it back up on one of my naze builds...but after frying a naze when I forgot to disconnect the OSD from UART1 before hooking up USB I've been gunshy about putting it back on. Plus I tend to tune out the OSD when I'm flying anyway so it's not a big benefit for me.

 

[thebatfink]

Thanks again for the advice.

Right now I have channel 6 with SoftSerial feeding FrSky telemetry to the D4R. I'd read about the issues of not having USB and OSD connected at same time. My plan was to feed the OSD from Channel 3/4 which I believe is UART2 so I should be able to have these two things + USB connected at the same time?

 

[Ocean]

Thanks again for the advice.

Right now I have channel 6 with SoftSerial feeding FrSky telemetry to the D4R. I'd read about the issues of not having USB and OSD connected at same time. My plan was to feed the OSD from Channel 3/4 which I believe is UART2 so I should be able to have these two things + USB connected at the same time?

Yep this should work fine.

 

[jhitesma]

Yep. Not much danger running it off UART2. That UART1/USB combined BS is my #1 gripe about the Naze and it's clones/derivatives.

On a related note...Marco67 who did the blheli update first posted on RCGroups this morning that he managed to get a baro working on this thing now as well. I'm not in a big hurry to duplicate that though. I do have 2 dead naze's I could pull the baro's from to try...but I've never been happy with baro modes on Naze and even on setups where it does work I don't use it very often. And adding it requires removing the IMU board from it's foam and then re-attaching it which is a bit more fiddly than I want to mess with.

But if I get bored one of these nights and feel like making another video.....

 

[jhitesma]

Well, my local radio shack still hasn't restocked from when I bought the last 5v beeper a few months ago. So I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a bag of 10 from China off ebay or less than 1 costs at RS. They arrived today so I figured I should get one installed on here.

I did a quick test just plugging it in with the wire that came with the emax. First impression. Emax what the heck were you thinking? There are two 2 wire pigtails - I assume one for vbat and one for buzzer. But they're both backwards and have the red wire on the gnd pin?! Besides...they stick out. Bleah. Don't like.

So once again I stole Marco67's method and just soldered some internal wires:


The buzzer wires were just a matter of soldering them to the inside of the connector:


The vbat sense wire I soldered to the inside of it's connector:


And to the positive lead of one of the main power capacitors:


I probably shouldn't share that last one as it's a HORRIBLE solder connection that I'm about to redo Soldering behind that XT60 is tricky - not much room in there even with a nice iron.

But it all works. I now have vbat sensing working and a buzzer working - so no more flying my nice tattu packs lower than I should

BTW - Anyone see those new RMRC packs they sent the e-mail out about today? Really tempted to pick a few of them up to try. 60c 1300mah 3S for $20...and 4s for $25....I may have to give those a try!

 

[Craftydan]

But it all works. I now have vbat sensing working and a buzzer working - so no more flying my nice tattu packs lower than I should

Yeah . . . why do I doubt that?

 

[tavolution]

I’m having problems with my Nighthawk 280.
Try plugging in my battery to fly my quad and there was no ESC sound, the three LEDs next to the usb port are off and other LEDs on the board were solid red. Connected quad to computer using Baseflight (LEDs were normal then), connected battery while connected to the computer and only then I was able to sound ESCs and was able to spin the motors with the transmitter. It worked just fine when connected to the computer but not off the computer. Don’t know whats going on.
Hope you can help as I haven’t been able to find anything on the Internet about this issue.

 

[jhitesma]

And here I was starting to think Dan didn't read my posts anymore

Tavolution -

I bet the little switch next to the USB port is turned off.

The manual and the marks on the PCB call it a "ESC Programming Switch" but based on what happens when you flip it I suspect that all it actually does is cut power to the Flight Controller part of the circuit. That's why the 3 LED's go out but the four for the ESC's are still on. And why it works when you connect it over the USB connection - when you connect it over USB the Flight Controller gets power from the USB connection.

The switch is just a little white nub on top of the blue case. You should be able to slide it. If the white part is closer to the USB port that's off. Just push it to the right as you're looking at that side of the board I suspect you'll be good to go.

 

[jhitesma]

Well...now that I've got "real" BlHeli on this guy I feel like I can finally quit messing around with baseflight and finally go ahead and put clean or betaflight on it. And what the heck....in for a penny in for a pound, let's just go right to betaflight.

I already had CF configurator 0.66.0 so I grabbed the latest betaflight NAZE hex (new version released 4 hours ago...hmm...maybe I should go with the previous version...nahh, I'm in it now so I'll go for as bleeding edge as we can get without compiling it myself.)

Flash went smooth and easy. Did the standard initial setups - setup PPM as my RX, setup my switches (I have my 3-pos on aux one with it's default position as acro, middle horizon, and other extreme as angle, aux 2 is my trainer switch which I have set to enable horizon as a "oh crap" switch, aux 3 I have setup to enable gtune in case I decide to give that a go, and aux 4 I have setup to both enable the beeper and trigger failsafe - that's my "where'd it go?" switch.)

Checked the failsafe setup...I like the defaults here better...dropped the motor cut time do 5 instead of 10 and set the failsafe switch option to 1 so it kills motors immediately when I flip it. Nice improvements there since the last time I tried CF.

Even went ahead and loaded a custom motor mix after learning about this site that does the calcs for you: http://www.iforce2d.net/mixercalc/

Well, it passes bench test and prop off hand held testing.

Setup profile 1 with PID controller 1 and profile 2 with PID controller 2. Gave them both 0.5 for roll/pitch rates and 0.7 for yaw to start with.

Tomorrow hopefully I'll find a few minutes to toss it in the air and see how it does.

One thing I noticed already...the twitching the motors did at zero throttle is now gone. The flash to BlHeli 14.2 didn't get rid of it but did minimize it compared to the stock setup. So it must be something about baseflight that was causing it and upgrading to betaflight has finally eradicated it. Nice.

Watch...now tomorrow is going to be super windy and nasty or something....

 

[jhitesma]

As I suspected...pretty darn windy this morning. And my mobius won't power up for some reason

But I snuck in a quick test flight.

Luxfloat and I still aren't very good friends. Feels kind of loose and less stable on the default settings, dropping the Pitch/Roll rate from 0.5 to 0.4 helped but that slows the flips more than I'd like. Just feels harder to fly on lux. On Baseflight I could put it into a hover and let go of the sticks, with lux I'm constantly on the sticks. Motors do sound smoother (still waiting for an openlog so can't check logs yet...all my other FC's have an on board chip so I haven't needed an openlog before.) And the Yaw with lux is having some issues. It's drifting and when I do quick yaw moves things get really crazy. Part of this could be the wind today...but overall lux just doesn't feel "right" to me still.

PID controller 1 however feels pretty darn good. Smoother sounding motors (though again without a log that's just going by ear) and more locked in feeling. Plus the yaw isn't drifting and while it still gets a little crazy with fast yaw spins it's not nearly as bad as lux is for me.

Of course this is all on bone stock PID's so there's probably some room for improvement - though with the new filters and defaults beta flight is supposed to fly pretty darn well on the defaults. And I guess other than the yaw on lux I can't disagree...it does fly better than baseflight did on defaults. But overall I'd say beta flight defaults are flying more or less on par with the partially completed tune I had going on baseflight - probably a little bit better.

So overall glad I finally gave beta a try and the combo of beta and blheli 14.2 is a pretty good win on this guy. But I'm hoping for a calmer day this weekend and a chance to get it dialed in...and do some FPV with it again.

 

[jhitesma]

Oh yeah...one other thing I noticed. Punchouts feel weaker. Not sure what the cause of that could be, but even full throttle just doesn't feel as punchy as 3/4 throttle did before. May have been the somewhat worn props I was flying today, and the wind...but just felt a little down on power compared to how it felt on baseflight.

 

[jipp]

maybe the battery decided to start to go?
interesting webpage for pid settings. id think it be hard to create a calculator because of the damn variables.
chris.

 

[jhitesma]

maybe the battery decided to start to go?
interesting webpage for pid settings. id think it be hard to create a calculator because of the damn variables.
chris.

It's one of my newest packs and was flying great the day before. Just seems like I'm not getting as full of full throttle on beta flight. Thinking about it more it could be the max throttle setting is lower than I was running on baseflight. May have to check that and maybe re-do the ESC calibration.

The calculator is for setting up the motor mix not PID's. Two totally different things. Most people don't mess with the motor mixer since quads are close enough to square that the differences are very minor. This is mostly helpful if you're running something like a deadcat or other setup that's non-symetrical. The 280 is very slightly unsymetrical - the calculated mix isn't much different. The pitch values are like 0.787/-0.787 instead of 1/-1 and that's the only difference from the stock "quad x" mixer setting. Really not worth dealing with unless you're being obnoxiously anal

Did another quick test flight and really liking the paw PID1 feels on the defaults. PID2 I could get used to except for the yaw issues I'm having with drift and how it gets totally out of control on fast yaw moves even if I'm level when I initiate them. Really not sure what could be causing that since it seems to be isolated to PID2 right now.

 

[jipp]

thats cool. im soldering up a versacopter.. and i can say i wish they invevented some kind of expoy solder that held up as good as regular solder.. because soldering to the pdb solder pads is such a pain in the rear man.. even with a decent solder iron.. really is annoying.. im a great welder,arc,mig,tig etc.. but solder man.. i dunno. but 2 more ESC to go, and the motors.. im not really digging the versacopter design so far.. i prefer the zmr frame. but i wont judge this on my lack of skill.. ill wait till its in the air.. i ordered a cheap 808 key chain camera to use.. that should be here for the maiden of this thing.. i will use a FC vibration thing i have.. for the camera to sit on.. and just double sided tape it to the top of the frame i think.
hopefully there will be enough room for a CC3D plus case in the versacopter.. i see FT is pushing the gropner FC/RX thing.. it seems to work great in the design with the limited space.. anyhow, back to soldering now iv had a break.. which i probably should of did after i got frustrated at first..

chris.

chris.

 

[Craftydan]

and i can say i wish they invevented some kind of expoy solder that held up as good as regular solder.

What? like Solder Paste?