As some of you know, I recently built a QAV500 after breaking down my hex for parts and to be completely honest, I was never 100% happy with the QAV500 for 2 reasons:
I don't attribute this to an inherantly bad design, I have always favoured the lower KV motors with larger props for longer flight time, but the larger the props, the more vibrations are present, even with balancing you will end up with some vibrations unless you fork out on top shelf components and then the costs quickly add up.
Another problem is that with large props things get quite floaty and unresponsive, for example, fliyng in manual mode with the QAV on the APM was so damn scary, that thing would bob all over the place and when flying forward and then stopping it would spin around and would give me a heart attack and make me keep my finger on the switch to return to "stab" mode almost all of the time.
The vibrations in the QAV were picked up by the imu on the gimbal and this translated to noise which would cause the gimbal to twitch. I don't know how many hours I spent tuning and re-tuning, the footage was never rock solid, even a DJI phantom 3 and at this stage I may as well buy one of them... BUT I love building so...
The QAV was sold and I was able to get back most of my money as I built it pretty well so now someone
Enter the TBS Discovery pro.
When I was looking at the QAV500 I was also looking at the discovery pro with the integrated Alexmos board, compact design I was quite intreigued but was not sold due to the fact tat it uses 900-1000kv motors with relatively small (9x5) props thinking that this would only give about 15 minutes flight time I put it aside however in reality I don't ever fly much more than 10 minutes when filming so it's actually not a deal breaker.
Please note that I have already built the Discovery and am now writing this for the enjoyment and benefit of others so I don't have many build pics but will post pics of the finished build later.
Parts:
TBS Discovery pro
TBS 1000kV "custom" motors.
KISS 30amp ESC's
TBS Crossfire - yeasssss!
Graupner 9x5 e-prop
TBS Boss 500mw Vtx
Pixhack FC
The build:
So this is a wonderfully designed product using the cheap DJI flamewheel arms it fits together nicely with the top and bottom plate connecting with the interconnect cable, the RX sits at the back of the craft and the signal is nicely transmitted though the board so no cumbersome wires.
The pixhack doesn't really fit too well without modifying the gimbal dampening arm but this itn's a problem, it fits the Naza much better.
I used the pixhack because the quality is excellent and more importantly the corssfire will natively support MAVlink and the RX could connect to a phone/tablet via bluetooth which does away with any additional 3DR radios for telemtry which is a dream come true.
I'll post pictures later.
- It was too big
- I was never able to get completely stable video footage as there were vibrations in the frame so the gimbal always twitched.
I don't attribute this to an inherantly bad design, I have always favoured the lower KV motors with larger props for longer flight time, but the larger the props, the more vibrations are present, even with balancing you will end up with some vibrations unless you fork out on top shelf components and then the costs quickly add up.
Another problem is that with large props things get quite floaty and unresponsive, for example, fliyng in manual mode with the QAV on the APM was so damn scary, that thing would bob all over the place and when flying forward and then stopping it would spin around and would give me a heart attack and make me keep my finger on the switch to return to "stab" mode almost all of the time.
The vibrations in the QAV were picked up by the imu on the gimbal and this translated to noise which would cause the gimbal to twitch. I don't know how many hours I spent tuning and re-tuning, the footage was never rock solid, even a DJI phantom 3 and at this stage I may as well buy one of them... BUT I love building so...
The QAV was sold and I was able to get back most of my money as I built it pretty well so now someone
Enter the TBS Discovery pro.
When I was looking at the QAV500 I was also looking at the discovery pro with the integrated Alexmos board, compact design I was quite intreigued but was not sold due to the fact tat it uses 900-1000kv motors with relatively small (9x5) props thinking that this would only give about 15 minutes flight time I put it aside however in reality I don't ever fly much more than 10 minutes when filming so it's actually not a deal breaker.
Please note that I have already built the Discovery and am now writing this for the enjoyment and benefit of others so I don't have many build pics but will post pics of the finished build later.
Parts:
TBS Discovery pro
TBS 1000kV "custom" motors.
KISS 30amp ESC's
TBS Crossfire - yeasssss!
Graupner 9x5 e-prop
TBS Boss 500mw Vtx
Pixhack FC
The build:
So this is a wonderfully designed product using the cheap DJI flamewheel arms it fits together nicely with the top and bottom plate connecting with the interconnect cable, the RX sits at the back of the craft and the signal is nicely transmitted though the board so no cumbersome wires.
The pixhack doesn't really fit too well without modifying the gimbal dampening arm but this itn's a problem, it fits the Naza much better.
I used the pixhack because the quality is excellent and more importantly the corssfire will natively support MAVlink and the RX could connect to a phone/tablet via bluetooth which does away with any additional 3DR radios for telemtry which is a dream come true.
I'll post pictures later.
