Tricopter LEDs Power source?

Loc8tor

Senior Member
for a meter of LED's off of HK, they draw 400Mah... thats 100Mah in 15 min... so you will not notice the decrease in flight time... in fact. if you run a separate battery for them you will see more flight time decrease then running them off the flight battery.

I'm VERY curious what your set-up is to lift a go-pro and the 5500Mah battery. As to the one motor losing 50% power output, id say its probably your ESC if it is the same motor every time. other question would be, does it happen the same every time? like you go 100% throttle to gain altitude and after 4 or 5 seconds that one motor shuts down? if so it could be the motor or ESC, motor might be overdrawing or something.

Lets also do the math on the lights current draw vs flight time reduction.

you say 5500Mah gives 15min of flight.

5500/15 = 366Mah/min so thats 6.1MAH per second. so 100Mah for 1 meter of lights is 100/6.1Mah/s = 16.39 seconds.

16.39 seconds of reduced flight time.

wow. I failed math. I would have never been able to figure that out. I don't think 16 secs is gonna be an issue. I'm using everything flitetest recommends for a batbone. I'm using 30 amp Turnigy Multistars speed controls. I'm using the blue wonders from laser toys. kk2.0. and the props they recommend. Like I said I'm not the best at math so i wouldn't be able to figure this stuff out. Someone has to tell me, get this get that...and I buy it and put it together. But yeah it lifts it. The time it would happen is when I was 100 feet up. It happend twice. Both times the antenna was coiled up in the batbone. Now I have the antenna straight up in the air. And have not flown it that high to test it. I'm having an issue now of making adjustments to trim and they work for a few seconds then i need to adjust trim again....and so on. Constantly having to adjust trim. Also if I drop throttle a little then gun it the front rears up like horse. I held my fingers around the screen and found I was tail heavy. I think that was my issue but a motor vibrated out of the motor mount and the set screw is stripped so I couldn't test it after I moved the battery way farther forward and the finger tested and seemed to balance ok then.
 

Loc8tor

Senior Member
I'd say the motor shutdown might be heat. The BEC in the ESC on motor one is powering the board and Rx. It might be getting just hot enough to shut down for protection. Have you noticed it getting hot? On my tri, 1 and 2 ESC's get hotter than 3, and 1 is much hotter than 2 after only 4-5 minutes so I am planning on putting a BEC on there, I just need to get around to it.
I don't notice it's getting hot. It's 30 amp when 15 was recommended. It's motor two that is doing it. I know you or one of you have explained bec to me but i've already forgotten or didn't fully understand it. But when you are saying you would put a bec on there would you have seperate device to power the board? or a plug from a speed control?
 

Loc8tor

Senior Member
Can you give us your motor/prop/esc/battery info and flying weight of your bat bone Loc8tor? One of us I'm sure will do the figures to see if one of your electronic pieces are being pushed too hard and shutting down to cause the oscillating crash.

30 Amp Turnigy Multistar speed controls
Blue Wonder motors 1380kv
8045 Props from Hobbyking.
kk2.0
3s 5000mah not 5500. I was wrong on that. Am I missing more info you need? Antenna was coiled up in the batbone. now it is up in the air.
 

FinalGlideAus

terrorizing squirrels
What is the flying weight? That will help calculate what load are on the motors in a hover when the details are put into ecalc.

It does sound like something is overheating. It could also be a bad motor or a bad solder joint. Try swapping esc's one at a time to see if the problem motor moves with the esc in question. If it does then the esc is the problem. If not then try swapping motors and see if the problem moves with the motor. Failing that check your solder joints and connections.

If you loose radio the copter will just drop out of the sky (unless you have a failsafe settting set). With the antenna the last bit sticking out the end past the shielding is the important bit. All the rest does not do anything but is there so you can get the important part where it will pick up signal best. It is worth mentioning that this end bit must be straight. Also, if you have two antennas they should orientated 90deg to each other. This is for diversity. The end of the antennas don't transmit or receive much signal at all so you don't want either the transmitter or receiver antenna pointing at each other or you will most likely loose signal a distance. This is why you put the two reciever antennas at 90 deg to each other because if one antenna is pointing directly at the transmitter during the flight the other antenna won't be. This is also the reason you see people's radio antenna's pointing sideways. Most of the people will point their transmitter at the aircrat they are flying so putting it straight out is the worst place to have it.

A quick little search on Youtube found this. It gives a basic understanding of how atransmitter antenna works. The receiver antenna works the same way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbo_cvYpj7Q
 

jhitesma

Some guy in the desert
Mentor
Also I find that most multirotors with 20A esc's or larger do best with at least 40C (or greater) constant discharge rate batteries.

I've got 2200mah Turnigy 25-25c's that are two years old and while not puffy are pretty rough looking from being through more than their share of crashes. And 3 month old Zippy 40c 2200's. The zippy's were cheaper than their own 20-30c batteries so I figured why not. I loved them at first. But despite treating them very well they seem to be loosing their punch while the old beat up Turnigy's which were my backup battery when I found how nice the zippy's flew are now the packs I'm going to because they just seem to deliver better still. I'm on a 2-3 pack a day habit with my quad and cycle through those 4 packs fairly regularly. I'm really looking forward to picking up a few nicer higher C 2200's or 3000's to try. But I'm also tempted to pick up 2 more zippy's (because of the price) to see if they feel better or if I've just gotten used to mine and that's why they seem to have less punch now.

I made that mistake at lunch and got my wife to eat a piece of spicy tuna roll that I didn't think was very spicy. Apparently it was considerably spicier than I realized ;) Guess I've been on more of a hot sauce kick that I realized lately!
 

Loc8tor

Senior Member
What is the flying weight? That will help calculate what load are on the motors in a hover when the details are put into ecalc.

It does sound like something is overheating. It could also be a bad motor or a bad solder joint. Try swapping esc's one at a time to see if the problem motor moves with the esc in question. If it does then the esc is the problem. If not then try swapping motors and see if the problem moves with the motor. Failing that check your solder joints and connections.

If you loose radio the copter will just drop out of the sky (unless you have a failsafe settting set). With the antenna the last bit sticking out the end past the shielding is the important bit. All the rest does not do anything but is there so you can get the important part where it will pick up signal best. It is worth mentioning that this end bit must be straight. Also, if you have two antennas they should orientated 90deg to each other. This is for diversity. The end of the antennas don't transmit or receive much signal at all so you don't want either the transmitter or receiver antenna pointing at each other or you will most likely loose signal a distance. This is why you put the two reciever antennas at 90 deg to each other because if one antenna is pointing directly at the transmitter during the flight the other antenna won't be. This is also the reason you see people's radio antenna's pointing sideways. Most of the people will point their transmitter at the aircrat they are flying so putting it straight out is the worst place to have it.

A quick little search on Youtube found this. It gives a basic understanding of how atransmitter antenna works. The receiver antenna works the same way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbo_cvYpj7Q


I don't have a way of weighing it, so I don't know the weight. it's not full throttle when i'm up there. I very rarely full throttle if at all. I get there slowly.
 

FinalGlideAus

terrorizing squirrels
With your setup I'd guess the weight at just over 1kg which would be making those little blue wonders work pretty hard since they would have total thrust of less than 1.4kg (my guess). You want your total thrust at about 2.1 times the flying weight of the copter.

I would suggest checking what I wrote above and try to beg/borrow/steal a 2200 3s pack to try.

Yes you will loose capacity but you will also loose weight which will mean less power required to hover and a slower battery drain so the loss is not linear. You will also find the copter come alive.
 
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Loc8tor

Senior Member
I will definitely try it out. I spent 79 dollars for these batteries so I the batteries couldn't be too bad to buy.
 

Dumpster Jedi

The One Who Speaks
:confused:

I don't have $79 invested in the four 3000mah 20/30c Zippy's I'm using. They run $13 or so apiece, so even if they crap out after a few months (I've been cycling them several times a week for two months as it is, with no noticeable difference in flight time) I still got $13 of fun out of each of them and then some.
 

Loc8tor

Senior Member
:confused:

I don't have $79 invested in the four 3000mah 20/30c Zippy's I'm using. They run $13 or so apiece, so even if they crap out after a few months (I've been cycling them several times a week for two months as it is, with no noticeable difference in flight time) I still got $13 of fun out of each of them and then some.

That's cheap. I need new batteries.
 

Loc8tor

Senior Member
I decided to put the lights on my Radeon. They looked kinda fragile and I am not 100 percent or even 50 percent at flying the tricopter or having it tuned right.