Start of my Versa rebuild for more power.

[PsyBorg]

As I have posted before I am loving my versacopter. It has provided me with a ton of enjoyment from the build process to learning how to tune to starting to run my own little race courses for practice. However I seem to have out grown the flying on 3s aspect and am now ready for bigger and faster.

I know that it can be flown on 4s with the recommended power pack. My problem is once I added lights, a hard wired battery warning system, and an fpv system heat (in my head anyways) started to become an issue. Rather then stress parts and possibly crash with a failure costing a lot of money I decide to upgrade some things over time and repurpose working parts to a new project.

I want to support Flite Test and keep it as much their gear as possible and I know some of this may be out of the normal but this was all about learning from the start when I originally bought the Versacopter. I picked up the 30 amp esc's so I KNOW I will be able to feed this power and not worry about stress failures. I went that high as after a few discussions about what I want to do the 20 amp esc would be right at the border line and they don't sell a 25 amp one.

Here is what I start this project with.



To start I removed the 12a esc's and wired in the new ones as well as mounted them out on the arms due to their size. I ran into some problems when I tried to do the initial throttle calibrations. 2 of the motors would spin fine, one not at all, and the last one would stutter and make weird noises. No biggie, I figured I waited to long in the sequence so I redid the calibration. This time 3 motors spun up fine and the one stuttering one was still there. Ok one ore try. This time everything swapped around. The one motor that was stuttering now worked fine 2 others were working and a different one was now sputtering.

A quick cup of coffee and an instruction sheet re read lead me to defaulting the esc's and starting over. Several attempts at that while trying to learn the timing of all that beeping was enough to make me pull my hair out if I had any to begin with. By this time I was starting to get angry so I left it where the last attempt at defaulting and recalibrating left me with all the motors finally spinning but one is stuck in some sort of braking mode.

End of day one.

 

[PsyBorg]

DAY 2

With coffee in hand I started searching the web for ideas about what's happening. I came across this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csCBMF8P3qg

Once I went thru and set the throttle ranges in clean flight I reset up my radio while watching the receiver information so I had all channel minimums at 1000 and all maximums at 2000 (they were 1135 and 1879) with centers at 1500. Thinking I was all set and good to go it was back to attempting throttle calibration. Well that got me a little farther along but not flight ready. All the motor spun up and revved a whole lot faster (wonder if I was flying gimped like that on the 12a's) but the one motor was now braking so hard the quad would spin a little on the table every time I changed throttle.

At this point I decide it was time to unhook all the esc's and default them all one by one. In the process of doing this several of the tiny wires that came with the NAZE had broken from being tugged and moved around so much the last two days. At this point I decided that a total rewiring was a necessity to be on the safe side. That and it still kind of looked like a birds nest now that the FPV system, battery warning, and lights were in the mix. So out it all came.

I stripped it down to the frame and booms and began by making a wiring diagram about how I wanted to neaten things up as I made custom harnessing and routing. I'm not going to detail the cutting and the soldering and the fitting the next few pictures will show you all what its like currently.

The first two show the layout and the new harness's





This one is the new way I mounted the NAZE to be more centered then the original offset in the build video.



These next 4 show all the sides where you can see the new esc's on the booms, the new vibration damped camera / headlight mount I made as well as the open sides since I could not get the delrin to work with the new arrangement where it wouldn't end up sawing thru wires.









End of day 2. Tomorrow I shall work on defaulting the esc's as well as any finishing things like motor alignments on the booms as well as hopefully testing and a re-maiden video if it is not raining.

 

[Keems]

I hear you on the esc calibration. It drove me crazy too. Some of the 4 were ever so slightly out of sync so calibrating all of them at once was nearly impossible. I ended up doing what you did. Defaulting each of them one by one.
Looks like fun. I'll probably be doing the same project in a couple months when I grow out of my 3s versacopter.

 

[PsyBorg]

Yeah was a nice little challenge right up to the point I bricked my flight controller trying to get the esc's going correctly. Guess Ill pick this back up once I get a new one. probably wont be until late may early June until I can spare the money to get one.

 

[PsyBorg]

Ok back at this again now that I am back in the air with this project. I spent the day working on tuning this after I flew 6 batteries in the morning Just to have time in the air. This is getting much more of a tighter feel and even had me feel good enough to try a flip. Both attempts failed but no crash. Seems I do not have the rates dialed high enough to get it to fully roll over. Thast why I spent the day woring on rates and pids.

I have several issues to work out though and they are in this video I made this evening. I show my entire clean flight set up and some of the quirkiness I have to work thru yet. I am un able to get black box to work without the quad tumbling over, Same thing with air mode. that lets 3 motors spin and the forth sit there staring into the sun. and lastly one shot but I am pretty sure I need to flash that to current release before that will work as they have been defaulted MANY times during this process to get back into the air again.

So any help or suggestions will again be much appreciated and investigated to the best of my abilities. Thank you all ahead of time for having the patience with us newer people and getting us into the air. Here is the video with all my current settings and issues.

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[Habakkukk]

What does the switch that you use to toggle flight modes tie into on your transmitter?

 

[PsyBorg]

Nothing I am aware of. Its the standard flight mode switch in the upper right on the radio. I defaulted the radio and started from scratch so there should not be anything other then the two flight modes linked in clean flight to that switch. The radio is a standard Devo7 if that gives anymore information to solve this problem.

 

[PsyBorg]

THANK YOU Habakkukk. You got me wondering as I was not sure what the devo7 was set to as a default. I looked at everything connected to the flight mode switch and found one deeper setting on the input for the switch. there were two chooseable settings so I tried the other one I think it set the switch to comm not FMtrim or something to that effect and that cured ALL of the weirdness in my setup.

I can now turn on black box and have it start and stop on command without changing any controls, I can now change rates with no controls changing and I can turn air mode on and off at will as well and not see changes in the controls.

Once again thank you sooo much. I assumed defaulting everything auto set it to a basic non change state.

 

[Habakkukk]

Haha awesome man, Glad you've got it working right!

 

[PsyBorg]

Will have some new video tomorrow. Hopefully I can finish tuning and get my first flips and rolls on video as well. I have a video of my first attempts the other day that never got all the way over but no crashes. Hopefully now that I can turn on air mode things will be much easier to do.

 

[PsyBorg]

Ok as promised here's the video of my first full battery doing flips and rolls after following the episode from Rotor Riot on the process of tuning. If you haven't seen it yet you really should as it not only shows you how they work it shows the process of how to work thru setting them correctly.

This is my video from this afternoon after dropping the quad in the deep grass twice before finding the timing to get power back up after completing the rolls.

Now all I think I have to do is raise roll rate up a touch and drop pitch rate down a bit to even them out. Then I can set RC rate a touch higher to make them work just a touch faster over all. Once that's done its practice practice practice until I can get some decent 4s batteries and different props to finish the upgrade to 4s.

 

[PsyBorg]

Quick update on this. Got it reasonably tuned to run 3s and 4s on the same pids. I just need to tighten roll pids just a touch and maybe tweek TPA to account for the 4s power. All in all its not flying to bad atm.

Thanks again for everyone that helped me get to this point with the changes I have made.

 

[Snarls]

Looking good Psyborg. If you are feeling comfortable you might want to increase your rates so that you can flip faster and not loose as much altitude. I an way its almost easier to flip faster because you need less room and time. Then you can bring on the double, triple and so on flips!

 

[PsyBorg]

Oh I have the rates set high enough I can flip in place and not lose much altitude. I been working on trying to do power loops and slower more smooth rolls. I just have to quit changing between 3s and 4 every day and work on 4s to get better with throttle management. Trying to find that flow. If anything I could bump pids a touch more for rolls and change the TPA point and values a touch. That is still set to .15 at 1600 I could probably go to about .35 and start it at 1400 if the way I THINK it works would get me the desired change.

I am running .7 rate for roll and .68 for pitch and .9 for yaw with an RC rate of .96 or .97 now and that kind of has a decent balance for both 3s and 4s goofin around like I was in that video trying to do more smooth power loops and such.

I did a double flip on the first flight on a 4s battery last week and I tried a high alt triple this afternoon but not sure if I got all 3 because I had a touch of yaw or roll when I did it and it completed a tad wonky so I was more focused on recovery.