Psyborgs Rotor Riot Alien build.

[PsyBorg]

I see a kid's playset that looks like it has some gaps... just sayin'.

Was eyein that up the day they put it in. I was thinkin if only I had a smaller quad as I was flyin the Versa when it went in hehe. Guess Ill have to test my skillz at some point huh.

 

[PsyBorg]

ACRO LOS! That is impressive. I can acro all day FPV. I cannot wrap my head around ACRO LOS and still need some sort of leveling LOS.

Cheers!
LitterBug

Check out my crappy Youtube page. I have several videos where I was working on acro stuff both LOS and FPV. Some footage is from action cams on the quad others are straight from the video feed. Just be wary some videos are loud so start them off with low volume. I started labeling the unedited ones as loud to warn people.

This one was back when the Versa was still on 3s and I was using a monitor for FPV.

 

[PsyBorg]

Well it is now officially broke in correctly. We HAVE green stains. took it out to fly 3 more batteries to get used to it and felt good with the little bit of added expo. Was moving around really smoothly and had worked up enough courage to try my first flips. I can safely say the part of the kiss gui that calculates degrees per second and tells you how many rotation it comes out to be is pretty much dead smack perfect.

I figured 2.83 rolls per second isn't to bad as long as I don't go full stick. What I didn't realize how the curve is so much more sensitive at the outer edges compared to Clean flight settings and expos. My first roll was about a 3/4 rotation and I caught it to level out smoothly. The next one was about the same. On the third one I figured to go just a tad more and holy crap it did 1 and 2/3 that I was NOT ready for and it earned its stains. No damage as it went in flat and soft-ish just cutting a nice hole in the field as it went down. What a sticky mess. Needless to say that will be getting toned down a touch until I can get used to the changes from flying such a lighter and more maneuverable craft.

So todays plan after cleaning it is to reroute the receiver to the lower frame in the back so those antennas are situated more like I like them, Then Ill move the FPV tx into the middle of the upper frame and make a new harness as I did not realize the HS1117 is only 12 volts not 5 - 20 like my other cameras. This way I can better mount the filter as well. More pics n vids soon.

 

[PsyBorg]

See post 3 for an edit that has more info and a video about the tuning I did so far.

 

[PsyBorg]

Well took it out today to see what it was like to fly with a clean FPV camera in a place other then the back yard. Went to the local park and set up a small course. Just as I put the last flag up a guy pulls up in a car saying they are about to have two teams practicing on the field I was setting up on. I asked how long and he said soon. I told him I only had 3 batteries to fly and asked if maybe a short delay to their start could be had but he wasn't goin for it.

No biggie I ain't here to cause problems so I moved to the other side of the park and set up after all the sports teams do reserve the fields thru the county for certain times and days. Anyway a smaller course was set up that had bright areas and shaded areas so it was good to see how my initial FPV camera settings were. I just did slower smoother (my version of that btw) runs to get a feel for the smaller lighter craft.

I do like how it is much tighter and easier to line up specially on gates. I point... it goes... I don't doubt I will get thru the hole I was aiming for now. Far less panic rocking trying to aim for the center. I do think I will have to learn to power thru the turns with this more then the Versa Copter because of the weight difference does not seem to carry as much. It also seems with the 1177 camera and the go pro 2.5 lens I can see how low I am and not get that truck mirror thing going and panic throttle out or tumble because I got too low. How low is low.. seems I make other people nervous at times but it all looks dandy in the goggles to me.

Anyway here is the action cam footage from one of the flights. As always it is raw footage so be warned it is loud.

 

[LitterBug]

I'm fortunate enough to have an AMA flying field a mile from my house. Doesn't see much use during the week so we don't have to worry too much about putting up gates and obstacles weeknights. Access to the field isn't obvious so we don't get the random people sneaking up on us while flying either. Got out last night and the weather was perfect. Didn't manage to get any LOS footage but got some tuning in on the Baby Tri. Hope to FPV it up tonight and get some footage later this week. I have a hard time keeping the left stick down and thus with gates and obstacles.

Hope your weather is as good as ours and you get plenty of stick time!

Cheers!
LitterBug

 

[gladscar]

great job

My next build is going to be a racer...may not be able to fly it because still learning that part. Awesome job and thanks for all the info.

 

[jipp]

nice build. i made this smoke stopper with parts i ripped out of a front fender of a Chevy elcamino figured the car wont mind as its a parts car anyhow




bigger than it needs to be.. but it works and saved my bacon so no reason to make another one.. when i do ill be sure to shorten it up.

i see hobby king has made one of these and did it wrong? price seems good tho at 4.00 tho.. i guess they will have to update the product. easier to make one if you have the materials of any thing pretty much in the junk drawer

http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/...nt=8344747854&utm_medium=email&utm_source=EDM
chris.

 

[PsyBorg]

I'm too poor to be paying for stuff and shipping it on the Rowboats. If I can I repurpose things or make what I need I do. That's another fun part of the hobby. I had originally got two bulb sockets and made one a smoke stopper and another just to drain batteries. In all the confusion with them updating my apartment over the summer my smoke stopper got lost in the shuffle so I ended up borrowing some wire to make an adapter to use with my battery draining rig.



They will surely save your bacon so its well worth the effort to buy build or steal one from a friend.

Thanks for the compliments and comments guys. It makes me happy people get something out of the effort of me trying to get better at what we do. There's tons of other crappy videos on my YT page as I have been documenting my growth with random videos of things or accomplishments and fails. Hopefully the next phase will be freestyle stuff to go along with my learning how to edit and properly post good videos.

 

[PsyBorg]

I'm fortunate enough to have an AMA flying field a mile from my house. Doesn't see much use during the week so we don't have to worry too much about putting up gates and obstacles weeknights. Access to the field isn't obvious so we don't get the random people sneaking up on us while flying either. Got out last night and the weather was perfect. Didn't manage to get any LOS footage but got some tuning in on the Baby Tri. Hope to FPV it up tonight and get some footage later this week. I have a hard time keeping the left stick down and thus with gates and obstacles.

Hope your weather is as good as ours and you get plenty of stick time!

Cheers!
LitterBug

Every day the winds allow me to fly I am out doing something. Depending on how my back and neck are doing determines how much and where. I been up to the park 3 days in a row and I am paying the price for it now. Will probably just walk out back to the picnic bench and do some more tweaking on the tune and maybe some los or fpv freestyle practice.

I just looked and the package tracking says the back ordered tx and different antennas have been delivered. I must have checked mail to early so Ill be working on installing the new tx later this evening.

 

[PsyBorg]

Ok. So I got my new TX in the mail a day early yesterday and started the install last night. I finished with making the harness this morning and just got done uploading the video.

I got the new Lumenier TX5GA variable power TX and a matched set of Aomway antenna's. Once that was done and I made sure nothing would light on fire after plugging it all back in I did a bench test. I set it to 25mw and chose raceband channel 6 randomly. I grabbed my goggles and man right away I could see an improvement. I walked around my apartment and not one glitch. With the old 200mw set up on Ibcrazy LHCP Cyclones I would get interference when I walked into my living room. If I walked out my front door and closed the door I would lose signal immediately. With the new set up I was able to go out the door, down stairs, across the small yard and mid way across the parking lot before any major signal loss. I was stoked.

I was so excited that in my rush to go fly I had forgot to charge up my action camera this morning. I have 4 beautiful 5 to 10 second viedos of the picnic table I use to fly from.

Anyway I burned thru 2 batteries just scootin around the back area and thru a gate I had made. There was some minor glitches but still on 25 mw it was better then any 200 mw feed I have had yet. Still unsure of the feed I wanted to do some free style to see what my latest changes to my tune had accomplished so I did two batteries of freestyle LOS in case the feed failed some where not close to ground or worse yet upside down. Anyway here is the pic of the new gear installed and a link to the video I posted off my dvr.

Now its pretty obvious I need to go thru and redo all the camera setup with the sky contrasting so bad and all glitchy.

 

[PsyBorg]

Well I spent the morning resetting the camera up. Its by far not perfect but way better then yesterdays test when I changed VTX's. I think I found a happy medium for bright days and cloudy days. I am sure that will be needed considering the forever grey and gloomy skies we have here from October thru February. I will probably bring up the color a little more now that green is green and blue is blue. I started this morning where brown was red and blue was green..

If anyone can tell me how to get rid of that contrast flashing in the sky before someone has a seizure it would be greatly appreciated. I don't see that in the goggles so that's a plus but it sure is annoying when I review flight footage on a big screen TV.

 

[PsyBorg]

Well it was a near perfect day to fly here so I went up to the local park for more space. Thank God there were not five soccer games and a bonfire to celebrate home coming for the local schools like there was yesterday.

So after yesterdays flights I had made a few tweaks I thought would help. Turns out I went the wrong way and made things a little worse specifically in the yaw department. I think I have Pitch and Roll where it seems to be happy now as they are nice and smooth when I want to float a roll or nice and snappy (well snappy enough for my reflexes atm) and no noticeable bounce afterwards that I can see. Roll and pitch even sound tight like you hear in some of the better videos.

I guess this evenings project is to revert back to where I was and make the change I did last night in the other direction. Hopefully that puts me in or nearer to that "Locked" happy place. In this video I started off with some acro testing so I can start getting used to what it looks like thru this new video system and "Feel" the fall and see how it free falls differently from the Versa Copter. Then I did some laps on a small circuit I made and tried some speedier straight runs. That is really where the self induced yaw issue shines thru. I will say my hands were surely shaking as I only have 30 degree tilt on the camera so at times I was looking straight at the ground and not seeing whats in front and how far away my turn was.

Anyway here's today's follies. the flight starts at 1:13 as I had trouble with the video and goggles syncing.

 

[Snarls]

Looking good again PsyBorg. That's just part of the tuning process I guess. Sometimes you tune one way and things get better. Sometimes they get worse. Do you tune at the field or at home before you go to the field. Having a laptop or tablet at the field for quick adjustments can really speed things up and prevent frustration when the tune is off. Also make sure you backup your latest/best tune. You don't want to accidentally make a tune worse and then forget what the good values were!

 

[PsyBorg]

Oh I am a firm believer of that back up and restore gig. Usually when I get done for the day I will come home and start charging batteries. The first one charged gets put to use with a few quick tests of flips n rolls in the side yard. Sadly there is not enough room for that yaw issue to rear its ugly head or I would have never flown it like that.

As for field programming I finally figured out where and how to get the stand alone version of KISS GUI and found out it won't run on my only laptop that has XP 32 bit pro on it. I will be looking for a small tablet to run it after I look into it more so I know exactly what can and can not run it.

What do you think of the pitch and roll setup for it? That is done with higher P and only 13D. I wrote more specifics in your test flight thread in that regard that may help you with yours.

 

[LitterBug]

Don't know why, but every time grass flies at the beginning of a flight, I chuckle. Serious John Deere at the start. LOL Looks like it flies really smooth and locked in. Glad you had great weather, empty fields, and free time to get out!

Cheers!
LitterBug

 

[PsyBorg]

Yeah. The guys keep our parks really nice. Matter of fact they had just cut the field and were just finishing up the smaller field on the far side while I was flying. The scarey part is when I fly I tend to get too low at my complex where I DO play lawnmower man. I love the 2.5 go pro lens but the very edges have a sweet spot where objects are DEFINITELY closer then they appear.

As for the flights they are getting better and better. I have a goal to catch up to Snarls level of control and reaction times. I am getting into finer changes now that I went in the correct direction for yaw. That last video on the faster parts did my eyes in when I watch them on the big screen.

Now I just have to learn how to fly it so I can get tha sponsors, get tha gurls, and get tha money!!!

Thanks for the compliments though it helps one feel like progress has been made.

 

[Snarls]

I have a goal to catch up to Snarls level of control and reaction times. I am getting into finer changes now that I went in the correct direction for yaw. That last video on the faster parts did my eyes in when I watch them on the big screen.

Now I just have to learn how to fly it so I can get tha sponsors, get tha gurls, and get tha money!!!

Thanks for the compliments though it helps one feel like progress has been made.

Thanks for the shout out Psyborg! Right back at ya. I've been watching you progress too for a long time. Maybe one day we'll both be flying in drone nationals.

 

[PsyBorg]

Thanks for the shout out Psyborg! Right back at ya. I've been watching you progress too for a long time. Maybe one day we'll both be flying in drone nationals.

That would be awesomely . I would settle for a meet up some how one weekend just to hang out though. I'm probably too old and slow on reflexes to compete seriously. Who knows stranger things have happened in my life time hehe.

 

[PsyBorg]

Ok so the next evolution for the Alien is to swap out the Filter and regulator with the TBS pnp 50 so I can consolidate the filters and regulators and add OSD and current monitoring in one unit. I pulled the trigger on that last night so somewhere between 3 and 10 days I will start the evolution and document it all in here.

An OSD and a mic is something I have wanted to have since I built the Versa Copter and that PNP 50 has it all and more in one unit. I like having a battery alarm but When I use it I am only getting 60% to 80% use on my packs having the OSD I will know exactly where I am at more precisely. I want the mic as I seem to have a bad habit of not getting back on the throttle fast enough after maneuvers which I don't do on the sims. I can only think it is because the delay in the sound in real flights vs no delay in sims.

While I have it apart I will make an effort to get a lost model beeper in and set up too. That I recommend as a must have for any quad copter that is flown anywhere but your living room.