MonoProp EasyVTOL Prototype

VAALLEON

Active member
Think .com bubble.. design viable sub 250g commercialized for general public first.. sell it off before that bubble bursts to fund the development of your SAR unit and probably more.

The final flight of the MonoProp prototype. It’s final because I had technical issues during the last 2 flight where I was practicing FPV. I lost the footage of the first flight (my DVR battery died). So the unit will be retired…

This is the second and the last flight from this morning. I took of with visual to make sure the unit operates properly after yesterday’s crash. I did a quick spin and transitioned to hover to put my goggles on. Then I have a couple of minutes of FPV flight at a higher altitude (as I don’t want to hit trees again). Then I transitioned back successfully (first time with the goggles on) and brought the unit down in hover. At this point I wanted to take a couple of more spins with visual but the unit lost power and crash landed. Unfortunately lost the lipo as it detached and hit the prop (DAMN!!! Brand new lipo…)

With this better battery (Zee is better than Ovionics) I am pretty confident I can FPV for 9 minutes. The unit is very controllable in airplane mode and you don’t really need to think about the controls as you can control it with 3 channels (throttle, pitch and roll). It auto balances, etc… It wobbles a little but this unit was always a little wonky, so I can live with that. The only tricky part, transitioning back to hover, can be achieved successfully with being easy on the stick and taking slow, and adding some throttle to compensate for the additional thrust needed for hover.

Now my buddy @Pysbog got in my mind a sub 250g unit. He thinks that I can make the million with that… lol, just joking:) So, the next MonoProp will be a smaller unit that incorporates all lessons learned with this and the latest watcher unit that I built.



Thank you



 

PsyBorg

Wake up! Time to fly!
Doesnt have to be the unit.. its the design you sell for the big bucks to finance your endless summers mate:LOL::LOL::devilish: you will need a working model for proof of concept but you already have that. and yes I have that much faith in your abilities after watching what you do over the years.
 

VAALLEON

Active member
Doesnt have to be the unit.. its the design you sell for the big bucks to finance your endless summers mate:LOL::LOL::devilish: you will need a working model for proof of concept but you already have that. and yes I have that much faith in your abilities after watching what you do over the years.

Thanks bud! Who knows? Maybe it gets there. We'll see I guess. But I really liked the idea of the sub 250g VTOL unit. I may do a kickstarter or something maybe with that.
 

VAALLEON

Active member
Decided to convert the MonoProp to test the autonomous unit with ardupilot. As can be seen in the pic we have lots of cables. The reason for this is that I have an Arduino board at the exit of APM to do the necessary mixings and convert the signals to a format that can fly the MonoProp.
  • Re-flashed an old OP GPS unit to work with APM board.
  • Arduino board is doing the necessary mixings for the thrust vectoring and the wings. One change is that on this version the wings are opened with the tilt angle instead of pitch input. I am able to reverse the yaw compensation feeding into the wing servos, so I am hoping that this unit will be more capable of handling the tail wind. There is a little bit of jitter caused by the Arduino but not too bad.
  • If successful the unit will be fully autonomous, using the awesome autonomous capabilities of Ardupilot.
This is the first test. It didn’t take too long for the unit to tumble but still promising. I thing the thrust vectoring servo ranges are insufficient so I will adjust them via Arduino code and some additional tuning will need to be dome.

 

VAALLEON

Active member
Crash compilation for the new sub 250g watcher. Currently the unit is around 300g but It will go below 250g with the new battery. The unit is about to completely give up due to too many crashes during tuning. Last 2 minute of this video is the latest and the best flight so far. Lots of tuning and fixes. I am hoping that I can complete the tuning on this unit and the next one can be crash free…



 

VAALLEON

Active member
Slowly getting it dialed. Much better control on this flight. I will need to build a new one soon as this one is kinda losing it over damage from crashes. It flies really well horizontal. Vertical flight and the transitions are still problematic at this point. Will wait for the new battery before further testing. It is lighter and I believe It will help with the balance.



 

VAALLEON

Active member
Got it mostly dialed at last. I cannot believe this unit actually survived this many crashes and still flies. Of course the crashes took their toll on the unit and you can see it flutter and shutter… Made some improvements in the configuration and learned a lot. I will do some further testing for fine tuning. This design and configuration will be the base for the autonomous unit.



It was a tough one…Flight time shows to be around 8-9 minutes which is not a bad time for a tiny VTOL unit like this one.



 

VAALLEON

Active member
Quite a windy day, great opportunity to test the skills of the little watcher and get some closeup footage of the flight, thrust vectoring and active wing compensation. Amazing little thing started the build journey very rough, not even hovering properly and crashed tens of times. But now it turned out to be the most skilled watcher I have built, which I have learned configuration tricks from which I will use on the bigger units. If you like aeronautics and flight in general you will definitely enjoy this video, especially the close-ups. I changed the attack angle setting multiple times during the flight so some passes have the higher and some have the lower attack angle.



 

VAALLEON

Active member
Indoors hover maiden of the bigger Ardupilot unit. Looks pretty well balanced and controllable. Ourtoors is a completely different game and may immediately crash, but this is a good start.



 

VAALLEON

Active member
Strong winds and a good test. The new unit handles very well but needs some further tuning. Good test with some awesome close-ups. This tiny one can get +10 minute flight time:)

 

VAALLEON

Active member
The wind is so strong it knocks down the unit before take-off, so I have to hold it down. Good test, a couple of glitches that will need to be adjusted.



 

VAALLEON

Active member
After many motor failures, testing a modified EDF motor in hover. Position and altitude hold. This is an Ardupilot Arduino hybrid. Windy day testing the skills of the unit...

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