I got a LOT of flying done while on vacation this weekend. I flew at an outdoor camping and music festival that I attended. I set the LCD screen up next to my chair and every single person who walked by was amazed. It was a real opportunity to share the hobby with people. And no worries--I flew safely and had permission from the event organizers and all that.
I did have one interesting incident that I'll share. The first time I took off, my quad started to shudder like crazy and climb, even after I lowered the throttle. I realized a flyaway was imminent and cut the throttle entirely, and the quad did a lazy half-roll as it fell from about 20-30 feet (best guess visually, from the goggles) onto its back. Zero damage was done to the quad, the battery, or the Mobius camera, which took a pretty solid hit. Not even a broken prop, actually.
The problem ultimately turned out to be that, just before I left for vacation, I copied the PID settings from profile 2 over to profile 1. I forgot that the Cleanflight profiles come with default in-flight adjustment settings for pitch and roll PID, and my default switch positions were causing P gain to slowly rise to maximum as soon as the quad was powered up. Although I was able to fix this issue, I ultimately wasn't able to get the quad flying right again until I did a full default on the chip and then re-built the config using Bluetooth and the MW GUI app on my phone. This was pretty tedious, because the Bluetooth link would need to be re-connected every time I rebooted the Naze, and also if I did something like a "dump" command, that pumped a lot of data through the link, the Naze would reboot. I have since purchased a USB OTG cable, which will allow me to configure the Naze from my phone without connecting the Bluetooth adapter (a big PITA with the pins where they are on a mini quad), and which will give rock solid wired connection. I'm not worried about not being able to connect in flight, since I always lose the Bluetooth link when I fly anyway, and it doesn't auto-re-establish when I come back into range.
Lessons learned:
1. As part of my pre-flight, I now always hold the copter and throttle up a little, then tip it forward and back, left and right. This confirms that the copter is stable and the props are all pushing the right direction.
2. For me at least, USB OTG >> Bluetooth for field configuration. The hard-wired connection boots right up and is rock solid. And it uses the easily-accessible USB port, instead of the serial pins.
3. Mini quads are awesome and so much fun to fly.
