Tough Tilt Tricopter Build

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When we released the Electrohub we always had a Tricopter setup in mind. We just needed one more piece to put the puzzle together and that was the Tough Tilt.
Now that it's here, we can finally make that dream a reality! If you are interested in living that dream with us, grab yourself a kit and follow along.


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Another HUGE win for us here is that we can finally offer electronics packs directly from our store!
When you are picking up your kit you can add the Power Pack from the same page. Don't forget your tail servo!
Once you have everything in order we can begin!


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First we will assemble the Tough Tilt.
The Tough Tilt comes in three pieces: the base, the motor mount, and the pin.
Grab those pieces along with your tail servo.


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The servo arm looks like a small X but we only need one of the arms. Use some snips to remove any three.


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This will allow the servo arm to slide into the motor mount of the Tough Tilt. Do a quick test fit, and more than likely it will be too big to fit correctly.


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Sand down the edges until it slides in easily.


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Once you get a nice fit we are going to lock it down.


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Drill a pilot hole through the farthest hole from the tip.


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Next trim down the securing screw. You DO NOT want this screw to be sticking out of the exit hole because it will catch on the base and cause binding once it's all together.


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Before you lock down the servo arm make sure to sandwith the servo screw between the arm and the mount with the threads showing. This is how you secure the servo to the mount.


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Now you can secure the arm down with that trimmed screw. Again, double check that it's not poking out the exit but still secured well.


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When we eventually have the servo sitting in the base it needs to be flush.


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Trim off one of the mounting tabs and sand it flat.


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Before you mount make sure you also center your servo. If you need a cheap servo tester you can pick one up from our store!


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Next insert the splines of the motor into the servo arm. Thread a screwdriver through the opposite end of the mount and tighten it down.


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There will be a tiny bit of the servo arm sticking up. You can trim that right off.


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Now we're going to attach the motor to the motor mount. This is pretty self explanitory. Just match the screw holes up and tighten down.
Be aware not to over tighten because this can shove the screw up into the motor itself and make for an unhappy tail motor!


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This step is optional but if you would like to screw in the Tough Tilt base to the tail boom you should do that now. Make the end flush to the end of the boom.
This is just an aesthetic thing if you don't want to zip-tie the Tough Tilt.


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Last step for the Tough Tilt is to secure the motor mount to the base by threading the pin through both pieces and using a screwdriver to secure it in place!
Next we can start to work on the frame!


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We will need to drill some pilot holes for the booms. Drill the first hole about 1/2 inch (1.27 cm) from the end of the boom and as close to the center as you can. Do this to all three booms.
Thread a screw through the bottom plate of the Electrohub (the bottom plate has the power distribution pads) to help you find where to drill the second pilot hole. The photo above should help you for the tail boom.


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The holes to mount the front booms will be the closest to the larger holes as you can see in the example. Don't be fooled and measure the ones in the middle!
Then drill the additional pilot holes for the other two booms and thread screws through everything to friction fit it into place.


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You'll end up with something that looks like this!


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Now we can mount the motors. For the two front motors we will be using the mounting discs. You'll make a nice sandwich that will look like:
MOTOR
disc
BOOM
disc
Secure this sandwich with two screws and repeat on the other front boom.


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The last motor to mount is the Tough Tilt itself!


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If you didn't already bolt down the Tough Tilt here is where you will zip-tie it down to the tail boom. Two smaller zip ties towards the front and a larger zip tie in the back.


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Next we can hook up the E.S.C.s.


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The edge of the PCB board the Electrohub is cut from can sometimes bully wire casing. Thread the black wire under, then up through the larger hole to prevent it from rubbing against the edge over time.


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Trim the E.S.C. wires so they solder nice and clean to the power distribution plates.
RED = Positive (+)
BLACK = Negative (-)
Don't do this backwards or you'll see some magic smoke when you power this up!
If you've never soldered before, check our Soldering Battery Connectors episode for some tips!
Repeat this for all 3 E.S.C.s.


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While the soldering tool is nice and hot we will also attach the battery connector.


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Again, make sure you are putting RED to positive (+) and BLACK to negative (-).
While shooting the video we actually forgot to do this step :(
If you're wondering why the battery connector is unreasonably absent from the rest of the build pictures, it's because we're only humans.


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If you are interested in building the Dragonfly setup Josh flew in the review video you'll want to do that now.
All you'll need is two extra booms, motors, E.S.C.s, and Y-connectors.
Mount the two extra booms 90° to the tail. The booms and E.S.C.s are all secured the exact same way as the others.
When making your connections, attach the right two motors with a Y-connector and the same with the left just as you see above.


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The only really quirky thing is these additional motors are mounted upside down. This way the props don't collide with the upright motors and still provide additional power and control because of their position on the CG (Center of Gravity).
This setup is totally optional but worth the little bit of extra work!
Wether you are now working on the Tricopter setup or the Dragon fly setup the remainder of the steps will be the same.


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To mount the top plate, run all your connection wires up through the center hole and line up the screws.


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Make sure you check to see if any of the wires are being pinched by the booms and the top plate. Needless to say, this is bad!


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Once everything is sitting well, secure the whole assembly with nuts.


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Now we can mount the flight control board. Eric designed this awesome little platform for it to rest on. There will be some foam tape in your kit and this will do two things. It will help raise the platform a little more so you can tuck all your wires nice and neat underneath and it also provides a bit of vibration dampening.
Cut a piece to stick the board to the wood and two smaller pieces for the "feet" that will stick to the Electrohub.


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We trust the tape to hold and we are merely using the screws you see above for alignment. You can bolt this down if you wish.


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All flight control boards are different and make sure you check your user manual for this step, but now you will connect your E.S.C. wires to the control board.
We are using the Naze 32 for this build, and if you want to see exactly how we set this up for our Tricopter you can watch our Naze 32 Board Setup episode.


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The last bit of electronics to hook up is the receiver. Here we are using a breakout cable to make the connections super simple.


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The landing gear can be zip-tied on at this point. If you look at the picture you can see they are tied so the connections from the motor to the E.S.C. are still loose. More on that later.


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The antennas should always be at a 90° from each other to give you max reception. We taped one towards the front and, you can't see it here but, the other is routed straight down out of one of the small holes in the Electrohub.


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To hold our battery we will thread two pieces of velcro through the larger holes towards the front and back.


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These will strong arm the battery nice and tight to the Tricopter. The battery is what will ultimately determine your CG so if your Tricopter seems off balance, adjust your battery.
We are using a 2200mAh 3S battery but you can go up to a 3000mAh 4S.


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Depending on your control board you will need to follow unique procedures to get your radio imputing the proper controls. Again check out the Naze 32 Board Setup episode for more.
We are almost there! The last step is to make sure our connections are working properly. Plug in your battery and put some kind of marker on your motor that will help you see which way it's spinning. You can make a little flag out of tape, a piece of paper, or a little leftover plastic bag.
DO NOT DO THIS STEP WITH YOUR PROPS ON!
Nothing ruins a build faster than a surprise trip to the emergency room!
The cool thing about tricopters is they can fly with the motors spinning conventionally (all counter-clockwise).
Secure the props to the motors ONLY AFTER you have all the motors spinning the correct way and you're ready to take it outside.


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As far as tuning your P.I.D. settings for our builds, we are trying something a little new.
At the writing of this article it is still under development but we will soon be launching a new page on the site called Setups.
You'll be able to find it at flitetest.com/setups and it will contain the settings that are important to get the best performance out of our multirotors and matched electronics.

We hope that you enjoy your Tricopter setup!
If you are a beginner and nervous about your first flight, have no fear! You can check out the How To Fly a Multirotor episode and Alex has your back!
If you guys have any questions, concerns, jokes, or strong opinions about why tri's are better/worse/the best/the worst multirotors, we want to hear from you! Be sure to leave a comment below.
LINKS



 

ExperimentalRC

Senior Member
The part that I cant wait for the most is the new setups page. I really want to see whats popular among the flitetest fans.
 

meehan

New member
I notice in the build they hooked up all three ESC to the naze32 so the naze board and the servo will be powered by the 3 esc in parallel. As long as these are linear regulators it should work but is probably not best practice. I always prefer to power the servo and FC from separate ESC so the FC does not see voltage drop if the servo binds and draws a bunch of current.

I am I being overly cautious?
 

danno242000

Junior Member
nice build ... just a couple of question which came up...
if you go with the dragonfly setup, what is the motorspinning direction of the 2 additional
motors pointing downwards ? same as their matching upwards motors ?
does it matter at all ?
also the prop needs to be mounted the other way around to create lift ?
 

Craftydan

Hostage Taker of Quads
Staff member
Moderator
Mentor
I am I being overly cautious?

From an electrical standpoint I've ranted about this before, and recommended people pull their power leads from the ESCs, and seen several others argue this practice with both switching and non-switching regulators . . . but one piece of evidence I must admit I've yet to see: failures.

Gotta admit -- this bugs me.

I simply haven't seen it on any of my builds where I've neglected to do it. I simply haven't seen anyone complaining that their UBECs have failed.

In the end, it's not the same as connecting two un-tuned regulators right next to each other -- these should be tuned to the same voltage, and the resistance in the power lead and the load from the FCB can provide a mechanism for any slight variation to be balanced, and give isolation for the regulator's feedback loop.

If someone has evidence to the contrary, I'm curious to see it. I know the theory, but if it's sound, reality should match.
 

jhitesma

Some guy in the desert
Mentor
From an electrical standpoint I've ranted about this before, and recommended people pull their power leads from the ESCs, and seen several others argue this practice with both switching and non-switching regulators . . . but one piece of evidence I must admit I've yet to see: failures.

Gotta admit -- this bugs me.

Well, it's not exactly the same situation and it's not a fall out of the sky kind of failure...but I have had a can't get off the ground kind of failure due to utilizing multiple BEC's in ESC's.

When I built my budget quad I originally used 10A multistar ESC's then later upgraded to 20A Blue Series with SimonK. On both setups I utilized the BEC's in each ESC - I used one to power my homemade FC, one to power my RX, another to power my Bluetooth module and one to power my GPS with the 4rd kept in reserve. This worked just fine.

However, when I accidentally flew at full throttle into the bed of my truck and knocked the oscillator off one of my blue's another forum member was kind enough to send me a set of the HobbyKing F20 ESC's so I could stay in the air. Like the Blue's and Multistar's the F-20's have linear regulators so I hooked everything up the same.

But...nothing worked. The FC couldn't read the GPS and got no signal from my RX. When I re-wired it so everything was driven off one ESC it all worked just fine. Switched it back to separate ESC's for separate components...and nothing worked again.

The best I can figure the regulators in the F series aren't quite as accurate as in the Blue's and multistars and there was just enough variation between them that the levels on the serial lines were off enough that the AVR in the controller couldn't deal with it.

So if you're looking to try and prove a point and want to setup for a failure I'd strongly suggest trying connecting all of the BEC's on a set of F series ESC's to the same FC ;)

Otherwise I have to agree, it's best to use a single power source, "crossing the streams" is just as bad for voltage regulators as it is for proton packs. Unless you know what you're doing and have a REALLY good reason to do it - don't! Even getting them close like I was isn't a great idea as I eventually proved the hard way.
 

SnowRocker88

Amateur pilot and builder
Off hand question: What is the camera/gimbal setup Bix had on his Dragonfly? Was it scavenged or purchased?
 

Josh Zimmerman

Junior Member
This is AWSOME!! Great video guys. I just ordered my kit, now I'd love to know where to get a dome cover like the one Eric uses on his multi rotors ;)
 

beltrancnc

Junior Member
Great job guys !!! New to the hobby and finding that I can't get enough time in the day to do enough research.
Placed my order for a dragonfly and all bits have now arrived, but I have the same question that danno242000 posted above.

Any help would be appreciated...

Questions :-
1, Dragon fly configuration, what is the motor spinning direction of the 2 additional motors pointing downwards ?
2, Does the spinning rotation need to match the upwards motors ?
3, Does it matter at all ?
3, Assumption that the props needs to be mounted the other way around to create lift ?

Thanks in advance ..
 

Balu

Lurker
Staff member
Admin
Moderator
1./2. I'd build it like a coaxial motor setup where top and bottom motors turn in different directions. So if the top one turns CW, the bottom one turns CCW.
3. Yes and no. The servo controlled tail motor is probably enough to counteract any torque even if all front motors turn in the same direction. But it will not be as effective.
3. Yes. The numbers on the props need to point upwards. No matter where they are mounted.
 

trevoof

Member
Some notes on my toughtilt tricopter build

Just wanted to share some thoughts on my tricopter build.

What I liked:
  • Lots of space on the plates and plentiful power supply pads - expansion is extremely easy.
  • Related to the above, it's much easier to keep the build clean when there's space and plenty of pads, which in turn helped in attaining "peace of mind" through the build process.
  • Breaks where it is supposed to: usually zip ties, and occasionally a boom for hard crashes (no electronics nor G10 casualties so far). To save a few zip-ties, I tried to keeping the zip-ties on only "finger-tight" such that they have a bit of give - they kind of snaps round the boom during mild crashes to dissipate the energy without breaking.


What I didn't like:
  • Drilling vertical holes through the booms with a hand drill. When the holes are slightly off - fitting them between the 2 plates gets very difficult.
  • Still haven't seen the set-up page for Naze 32 yet. I eventually figured out that I had to reverse the servo/gyro yaw on Cleanflight, and also set the board alignment pitch adjustment to 180. Going through RCExplorer's page on set-up and getting the firmware helped a lot.
 

Fyathyrio

Member
So, had a little spare time this evening and started on my Tough Tilt Dragonfly build. I started on the yaw servo first, and while sanding the servo arm down I noticed there was a small ridge on the top side that would prevent the arm from sitting flat against the Tough Tilt. (If you watch the build vid, you'll see that Josh's servo does not sit perpendicular to the tilt axis.) A few seconds with some sandpaper and it was gone. Once I had finished installing the servo on the Tough Tilt, I noticed it was still off slightly. Pulled it apart and noticed that the supplied Emax servo arm retention screw was slightly higher than the servo arm, preventing the servo from sitting flat against the tilt mechanism. Simple fix, I grabbed an 8mm drill bit and reamed the hole slightly where the servo arm screw hit the Tough Tilt assy until it sat flat when screwed in place. Sorry, no pix...
 

trevoof

Member
Centre of Gravity for Tricopters

How do you balance your tricopter? Or more specifically, where do you place the Centre of Gravity for tricopters. Some suggest the geometric centre of the 3 motors. I feel that the centre of thrust of the 3 motors seems to make more sense: 2/3 of the way from the tail motor along a line perpendicular to the imaginary line connecting the 2 front motors.

The centre of thrust and geometric centre are the same if the three motors are equidistant; but for a frame like batbone they differ by about half an inch, not a lot; even more for other unconventional designs.

Or perhaps it doesn't really matter? In rate mode, the gyros just measure the angular velocity, and should be the same anywhere on the frame so the flight controller will automatically compensate. But are there sacrifices to performance?
 

Craftydan

Hostage Taker of Quads
Staff member
Moderator
Mentor
CG for all multirotors in hover will always be through the center of thrust -- the physics of "not tumbling through the air" force the control board will adjust motor speeds to accomplish this.

Now ideal CG is the point where the motors are evenly loaded, typically in hover. Where the sensors are placed is somewhat independent of this.

Notice "evenly loaded" and not "equal speed". You *can* build a multirotor with different motors and props such that the control board will not need to compensate for the difference any more than the manufacturing differences between identical motors. So long as each motor's lever-arm is sized to it's contribution to total thrust the motor's thrust will more-or-less balance out, with the control board being none-the-wiser.

Which leads to the tricopter . . . For a Y-6 I'd agree completely -- 2/3 forward from any arm -- but a tri? Close, but not entirely so. Keep in mind the tri is thrust vectoring for yaw, so not all of it's thrust is downward in a stable hover. How much will depend on the airframe -- I've had one tri (admittedly, all spinning reverse) that had a fairly steep angle in hover. So how much is lost? This follows the cosine of the angle, which for low angles is almost no loss (20 degrees is only a 6% loss), so unless it's fairly extreme, you're looking at nudging it forward by that same percent loss.

"So Dan, it's not 0.66, it's 0.7. What's the big deal?!?"

Yeah it's slicing at hairs, but it gives a better picture of what's going on. It's really the balance or weighted average of the motor's strength that finds the evenly loaded CG on any multirotor. This also works for the V-tail (which has a fixed thrust vector) and airframes with intentionally mis-matched motors (bot tri's and V-tails are occasionally optimized in this way). There's also quite a few write-ups for moving these adjustments into the control mixes for various frame shapes, like the dead-cat, but CG placement to help even the loading works on the same principal.

As a side benefit this also gives a little bit more visibility into why a tricopter has such odd coupling behaviors that pents will somewhat share but Y-6's do not -- that bit of thrust vectoring on a Tri is not constant in a maneuver. Where a quad can easy balance it's inputs for any axial command, the tri cannot, so you get the yaw-roll-pitch coupling that makes it so swooshy. The more responsive modern flight controllers have helped flatten-out the tri a bit, but they have a bit more work to do than the typical quad, and that generally leaks out a bit.
 

rockyboy

Skill Collector
Mentor
How do you balance your tricopter? Or more specifically, where do you place the Centre of Gravity for tricopters. Some suggest the geometric centre of the 3 motors. I feel that the centre of thrust of the 3 motors seems to make more sense: 2/3 of the way from the tail motor along a line perpendicular to the imaginary line connecting the 2 front motors.

The centre of thrust and geometric centre are the same if the three motors are equidistant; but for a frame like batbone they differ by about half an inch, not a lot; even more for other unconventional designs.

Or perhaps it doesn't really matter? In rate mode, the gyros just measure the angular velocity, and should be the same anywhere on the frame so the flight controller will automatically compensate. But are there sacrifices to performance?

I'm researched and done a tiny bit of experimentation with this - and what I've come to understand is anywhere under the flight controller will work just fine, but closer to the center of the flight controller is better. I'm using a KK2.1 and the CoG is about a third of the way from the back of the flight controller, and it seems to hover and control just fine. But I've only had it up for a few short hovering sessions and haven't really put it through serious flying paces yet.
 

trevoof

Member
Thanks Craftydan, Rockyboy, very useful. I do feel that the rear motor runs a tad bit warmer on the electrohub when balanced dead centre on the plate. Will experiment with a balance point further forward to see if there's a noticeable difference.
 

martin90

Junior Member
3000mAh 4S It is preferable, but it will affect both the autonomous flight and on the weight of the structure itself and Physics