He's been enjoying the KK and his quad has been flying nicely. He's even strapped a camera to it for a quick test flight. I got to try it and as discussed in my budget quad thread I found KK interesting but think I still prefer the "Feel" of MW in the air.
Well, apparently when MRSS got a batch of Naze boards in my friend Alex picked up a couple. So he decided to swap one in for his KK and see how he likes it. I know he's drooling over the warp quads and is seriously considering building one and using this quad more for FPV or filming. But he wanted to get a taste of Naze and see if this big boy could do some acro.
So we swapped his KK for a full Naze32 late this week. Except yesterday he slipped. Let a live battery wire touch the wrong pins and the STM32 on his Naze went up in smoke. Or as he put it "Smoke, lots of smoke...and a little fire." Ouch. I've got the board here and the STM is toast, got a hole burned in it and one trace may even be melted. But the rest of the board looks ok, going to see if I can still talk to the USB chip on it and may try replacing the STM to see if the board can be salvaged. Luckily he also bought an acro naze. He was really looking forward to using the full naze and trying out altitude hold and heading hold...but figured he may as well put the acro on it and see how he likes it.
Well, we both love it
We tried using my USBOTG cable to connect it to my phone...and it worked...but as soon as we tried to load the PID screen my app crashed. It's doing the same thing connected to my MW over bluetooth so it seems to be a bug in the app (I'm running the beta version and bugs are not uncommon since the author updates it so often.) Which meant we couldn't tune in the field today. As a compromise we setup the three profiles instead. #1 setup with higher rates (1 for RC 0.65 for PID) #2 his stock rates (0.9 for RC and 0 for PID) and #3...well, I forget what he set different on #3.
We went out to fly and he got in the air first. Had me talk him through some flips thinking we were on profile #1...but he never actually confirmed that. Doh. Turns out we weren't on profile 1. But he still flipped even with the low rates. Just glad he was several mistakes high when he did! Here's the video of those first flips - excuse the shakiness...forgot a real camera so this was cellphone footage today:
After that we fired up my quad in full FPV mode. Was neat finally flying with a spotter. Though a little disconcerting how he's start freaking out about "You're getting REALLY far away man!" when I could still easily see us in my feed and it didn't look that far off
I thought I was lazily flying around but he said I was really zooming. Need to work on a better camera position I think...fixed camera just feels too limited to me - in slow movement I can't see enough ground - in FFF I see too much.
We took turns flying mine LOS then and I managed to get through 3 batteries on the new motors today. Man does it feel good on those new motors! With my app acting funky I wasn't able to up the rates on mine...but I did a few flips anyway and ended up bouncing off the ground because really my rates were too low for flips and I knew it. I really wanted to bump my rates up to let him feel how my quad feels with high rates....knew I should have setup profiles months ago.
At some point we put his back in the air but he first realized he was on the low rate profile. So he swapped to the high rate profile and suddenly the flips were super easy! It's no warpquad or warthox or anything...but it will flip easily in it's own dimensions now. And he could still go higher on those rates....here he his having some fun with the higher rates:
For the record this is all in Horizon mode today...he's still working up his nerve on Acro and I didn't feel like trying his quad in acro before him - heck I'm still trying to use acro more on mine.
I'm much more impressed by his quad with the naze than I was with the KK. It flew well on the KK...but the things I didn't like about it on the KK are now gone and the things I did like about it before are even better. Compared to mine it's more stable, but flips tighter and feels more dialed in. The robotic yaw of the KK is gone, and while the yaw could be a bit snappier he's still got the rate fairly low on that (we bumped it a bit but not as high as mine since we weren't sure how my MW settings compared to Naze settings on that.) so there's room to experiment still. The yaw just feels much more dialed in now than it did on the KK even with the scaling turned up on the KK.
It's still nice and dialed in feeling...but not quite as "snappy" or mechanical or digital feeling as the KK. It has that more organic feel that I like about my MW. But the bigger rotors and arms are still apparently with it's increased stability and very slight ponderousness in the air compared to mine. He's getting much longer flight times than me though. Part of that is due to his larger batteries (he flies a 3.3 and a 4.0 compared to my 2.2's) but those bigger slower props are calling to me. Thinking more and more about building a larger video quad and using my current one more for acro bashing and mid scale FPV.
Overall a great day of flying. We also snuck in some fun with his X4, my X1 and my new proto-x before we went out.
Only bummer about the day was I assumed since he grew up here and was driving a truck that he knew how to drive off-road. Oops. Turns out his truck was 2WD only and he didn't know to stay on the path and not pull off to park. My desert proving ground is really soft sand once you're off the path and sure enough he sank a tire to the axle. Tried putting some traction under his tire...no go. Aired him down a bit...too late. I had some tie-downs we tried to fashion into a pull strap...snap. So I ended up having to run back to town to get my snatch strap and then come back and tug him out. Even with a proper strap my first attempt with my truck in 4 low resulted in me sunk to the axle at all four corners
Thankfully I know how low I can go on my air pressure and with my tires dropped nice and low I was able to crawl out of my ruts. Tugging him in the opposite direction gave me firmer ground and first try he popped out.
Oh well, at least none of the flying vehicles had any serious issues!
