Stingray 500 - REVIEW

[fliteadmin]

Today we had the pleasure of being visited by 3D and FAI World Champion, Curtis Youngblood.

He also brought along his friend the Stingray 500.

This is the first ever commercial collective pitch quad copter.

The blades are custom built and designed by Curtis himself.

Under the hood, the Stingray stays relatively simple.

All four blades are driven by a single 3000kv motor which distributes the power using an ingenious belt system.

The four servos are controlled by the TG-Multi. This control board was custom designed by Curtis and his father.

The canopy is beautiful for FPV racing or just FPV flying.

On top the view gives a great perspective of the Stingray itself or it can be placed down by the front scoop to have less body and more scenery in the shot.

In the air the Stingrays 3D capabilities are unparalleled. Trust us, these screenshot do not do it justice.

Thanks again to Curtis for letting us check out his beautiful mulit rotor and for these amazing shots of Canton, OH.

Be sure to visit Curtis here and check out all the goodness he has to offer!

 

[xuzme720]

A lot of people hate on Curtis, but he is truly a great pilot and an innovator. Thumbs up!

 

[yorickjoo]

Apart from the amazing innovative quadcopter design: Please explain how he modified his transmitter with the rotating stick on the right side. Seems easier to fly!

Flitetest, please do a special on that or explain how to do this. I know it must have something to do with placing a pot in top of the right stick, but how to attach this mechanically?

 

[jhitesma]

I want to love this for so many reasons. Most of which Curtis explains wonderfully in the video. But I can't get over my fear of that many moving parts. So much that can break and go wrong. It's a wonderful design and highly efficient with a lot of benefits. But by no means is it simple when compared to a traditional quad.

4 servos with their linkages, 6 belts (I think, can't tell for sure just how many), a dozen or so pulleys, and a single point of failure for the motor/ESC.

That criticism aside I still want one Amazed at how locked it in looks even without a GPS for position hold. I'm sure Curtis's skill at building and setup has a lot to do with that.

And while I'm really glad that FT had him on to demo his creation and as David said it shows off what the Stingray can do way better than they could have....I still really want to see what FT can do with one. I'd like to see how one assembled by Josh or David and flown by Josh or David does. Even if it isn't as jaw droppingly amazing I'd love to see if they assembled and flew one if it would have the same nice points even if they can't do all the crazy acrobatics.

 

[finnen]

jhitesma, I mostly agree that the Stingray is more complicated than a regular quad. But I disagree about the "one point of failure". A "traditional" quad also has one point of failure (if one motor/esc dies, it crashes), but it is actually more likely that one of four motors malfunctions, than a single one. In that concern the Stingray would actually be theoretically more reliable.

 

[Craftydan]

In all fairness, this doesn't appear any more mechanically complicated than most high-end CP helis (especially the nitro helis), which has been Curtis's bread-and-butter platform.

I think we've just been spoiled with how simple the mechanics on a quad can be, because all the mechanical junk has been pushed as far out on the end of the boom as we can get away with. He's just brought quite a bit of the moving parts into the center of the frame.

For his trouble it's picked up a LOT of capability, but it has it's disadvantages -- crash durability being one. That's nothing the new to the heli pilots. It is, however, one reason I fly 4 tiny, simple, fixed pitch copters at once, instead of a single big complicated one

 

[jhitesma]

Yeah, compared to a CP heli it's simple. But compared to a traditional quad it's hard not to argue that it increases complexity quite a bit.

I can see it as being appealing to heli guys, but I suspect it will draw more interest from multi fliers than from heli fliers. Just seems too different from a heli to please most heli fliers IMHO.

And yes, I'll concede that on a quad one motor out is (for now at least) a "fall out of the sky" level of failure. But on higher motor count multis that's not the case. And I saw something yesterday on the multiwii forums about a group working on a way for quads to recover from a motor loss: http://www.multiwii.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4364 (though apparently it's suspected to be using external motion capture to pull it off.)

I'm really curious how much of it's behavior is due to the control board vs. the mechanics of using CP props. I can't think of anything about the CP setup that would give it the ability to hold position that well in wind without a GPS. I've got to believe that that's all due to the control board and whatever algorithms Curtis has come up with based on his extensive background and experience.

If my suspicions are correct I'd love to see them sell the control boards. But I can understand them not wanting to to protect their market. Still seems like they may be passing up some other potential markets by doing so.

Wish I had time to listen to the podcasts...I'd love to hear more about this one...

 

[Craftydan]

The good position hold w/o GPS? I agree, that's a fancy board. would be nice if he shared

The aerobatics? Don't care how good of a pilot I become, none of my current quads will ever perform a clean barrel roll and hold the roll's axis level, or hover inverted, or autorotate, or . . .

Frankly, I think this is breaking ground. we're all enjoying the simplicity of multirotors, in a lot of the same ways many new heli pilots enjoy the simplicity of a fixed pitch. Untill this, however, the only upward multirotor paths were in raw power, efficiency, and agility. To get anything with a significantly different flight envelope, we'd have to change the fundamental platform. This is the same fundamental platform, in the same way as fixed vs. CP heli, with a significantly more open flight envelope.

Yeah, most of us aren't going to want one now, but the more I zip around my yard, pulling tight turns and ducking though small gaps, the more I'm going to want something more like this platform's open envelope.

. . . not sure I want it $700 more, but early adoptors pay for the R&D, and I've still got plenty of play left in my multis

 

[jhitesma]

The good position hold w/o GPS? I agree, that's a fancy board. would be nice if he shared

The aerobatics? Don't care how good of a pilot I become, none of my current quads will ever perform a clean barrel roll and hold the roll's axis level, or hover inverted, or autorotate, or . . .

Not trying to downplay that it's a game changer at all. But I'm just not convinced that it's the nature of the CP props that's enabling ALL of the features you just listed. I'm sure that it plays a factor in it and there are a lot of neat upsides to going CP.

But I also think a lot of that like the clean barrel rolls and axis holds are more due to software than hardware much like the position hold without GPS.

The inverted stuff and autorotation - yeah, that's definitely due to the CP stuff I have seen a few videos of some impressive stuff with "traditional" quad setups using special firmware on the ESC's to enable reverse rotation that do inverted and a lot of the crazy 3D stuff....but pitch changes do seem like a much better way to do that.

Really I'm just blown away. I'm blown away by the hardware and the software that makes this possible. I'm just trying to figure out how much of it is due to software vs. hardware and therefore how much might be possible with fixed pitch quads by making improvements to the software.

I strongly suspect that a larger portion of the impressive stuff is due to the software more than the benefits of having CP (which is by no means meant to downplay the incredibleness of going CP.) I'd just love to see what he can do with a fixed pitch quad and his software magic

Oh yeah - and I still want to see how someone like Josh or David would do with one of these to compare. I think that would tell us a lot more about how much is pilot vs. how much is controller software vs. how much is hardware.

 

[Craftydan]

Agreed. I'd love to see David or even John Coyle come back and give this a try -- while it was great to see the close to best in the world pilot make it look easy, but I wanna see what a mearly good pilot can get away with.

If you haven't guessed, I'm on the other side of the capabilities vs control -- That board is indeed doing some fancy things, and likely makes a few of those stunts less tricky, but I think a great deal of it is in what CP provides the pilot and the pilot knowing what to do with it -- pretty sure that wasn't an "auto barrel roll". A little easier than a traditional copter? maybe, but I doubt by that much. I suspect he's taken great pains to make this respond as much like a perfectly trimmed CP heli as he can, so it's easy for him to pull of the stunts he's trained on. Beauty of that would be, the CP multi doesn't have to be perfectly trimmed for the control board to fly like it is.

The things I've seen with reversable ESCs are indeed impressive, but I've yet to see one control altitude while doing it -- simply takes too long to stop the bell and spin it up the other way. A super smart control board might help clean some of that up, but it can't make the motor bell massless and reverse the prop's bite as as fast as a sevo can flick.

I'll also agree, I've seen this quad several times before this review and blown away has always been my reaction. $700 is still too rich for my blood, but It's way too much copter for me anyways Hopefully by the time I'm ready to keep it off the ground, the price will have adjusted a bit too.

 

[Foam Addict]

I like the auto rotation abilities, that has some wheels spinning in my head right now.