Been a couple days, but I’ve been flying around. The larger batteries (4S – 4000 mAh) came in and they’ve increased flight time to make it much more enjoyable.
The biggest annoyance so far is the visual range. The yard is about the range and behind buildings is a goner! How do we get this to “satellite transmissions”? A second camera would be nice too.
Anyway, I’m a goofball and thought it was cool that I could blow out leaves in the gutters and I crashed and broke one of the arms.
General Update and outline of some of the questions I’m having and progress.
Currently able to get flying around with a camera but I’m getting annoyed by battery length and connection. The batteries I have seem to be dead as soon as I plug them in even though they should have a full charge so I basically fly for 3 minutes and come back. I bought 2 more 4S batteries so waiting on those to come in.
The connection is like 20 yards and then I start losing signal. This seems to be signal on camera so I have a lot to learn there. I also don’t know how to see my radio transmit control.
Loitering is cool though. I’ve never had a drone that basically chills out by itself so I had fun getting this one going.
Questions / Next Steps
Working on the drone 2 days in a row, now we’re cooking!
Main Goal:
Fly it and attach a camera
Execution:
I have another small racing drone that has an FPV camera on so I took a look at it, removed it and was going to fit it to big boy drone here. I took it off and read the pins that it was attached to on the racing drone which was GND, 9V, RX & TX.
Looking at Pixhawk 6X there isn’t a pinout that says “Camera” or anything easy of course. Time to look at the manuals! The Pixhawk 6X had some notes for telemetry but I’m a novice and wasn’t sure what it was looking for. Taking a quick gander at the camera which I had no idea what it was so I Google the label, CADDXFPV, and find that it could be a Walksnail Avator? Link Here. So again, we have the four wire leads RX,TX,GND, VCC but it says UART, what does this stand for? FC and this rings a bell with the UART labeled on Pixhawk 6X which is some weird connection type.
I start to make my own wire and then I see it has a wire already…. heck this wire was already made to plug into what I need…. Oh hey! I already did this once before. Triple check pin-outs and yup, it should work. Off to the yard!
Takeoff:
Plug it all in and everything is working as is. Camera loads up (upside down so I gotta flip that around).
Flight was great. At first, it seemed with a slow responsiveness and then I realized that I was in a different flight mode. Stabilize, loiter, and Auto? Not sure, I’ll look into it more and understand what it’s supposed to do.
Other Findings
My batteries suck. I have 2 older 11.1V 3S batteries and they both drained very quick even though they were allegedly fully charged before. I have 1 newer 11.1V 3S Battery but that was working for the FPV headset. I do have another 4S 14.8V Battery but the charger is claiming that it is low voltage so now I hope that it’s not ruined… Gotta look into that too.
I did get the Googles to read battery voltage. Is this the data that the RX,TX is pulling from the camera on a UART Channel? Find out.
Next Steps
So I have a ton of interest in drones, planes, rockets, and anything in the aerospace field. The problem is that I have bills and I have devoted my life to my current work in plastics manufacturing so I have not had a ton of time to dive into these projects but hopefully keeping records of the project will keep me accountable. It’s a side project at first that is intended to drive me into a passion directed business someday.
End goal of project:
Flying car to revolutionize transportation.
Current goal of V1:
Build a custom quadcopter with off the shelf, open source hardware. Fly it around the backyard. Understand access to the root telemetry and how the hardware functions.
Status:
Awhile back I spent some time on this project and did some preliminary research. I bought a Pixhawk 6x flight controller due to its deep complexity but open source. I was hoping to get it up and running quickly and just sort of build little mini-projects into the drone to keep inspiration going.
I am just know revisiting but from what I recall, I have the hardware all connected but I could not get it to fly. The rotors would spin but I had no lift or it was unstable?
The biggest question mark I have with it at the moment is the best software to use to upload and pull data from. I believe I have QGroundControl since I have a Mac. It’s not a very intuitive interface and it seems like the system is made best to make structure flight paths and let the drone fly the path. Not really my interest but even if it were, something is working correctly.
Bare with me as I feel like a complete novice but that’s the whole goal of documenting. Below is the hardware on this project:
Hardware:
Next Steps:
Re-familiarize myself with the system and actually get this thing flying
After Today:
I spent some time re-calibrating and looking over the firmware. I’ve learned that the Pixhawk 6x is the hardwarwe and I can upload firmware for Ardupilot or PX4. I went with Ardupilot from the content creator’s recommendation. Ardupilot 4.5.4 for quad-copters.
Learning
I did not have a telemetry radio which I learned is the best way to control the system through a computer and I believe it would replace the need for the FrSky X8R control so I ordered the SiK Telemetry Radio V3. It’s supposed to have 300m of range which is close to 300 yards. We will see.
Troubleshooting
I had weird safety arming issues where the throttle control parameter FS_THR_Value was not meeting the correct parameters. I moved that parameter down to 910 and it worked. A second safety hardware switch is for the GPS button to be held.
6:00PM Status
I did get motors turning but have not lifted yet since my radio control was dying and I did not have telemetry to control without radio.
Next Steps are to get it to fly in the air later today. I have to wait on telemetry for further programming so now I might look into how the data is coming over and what I can do to make a custom software around it.
One goal with a custom software is to have a 3D visualization and complete understanding of all the firmware parameters and capabilities. If I can add accuracy in movement and then long distance in movement, that would be ideal. I will have to explore on custom configurations so if I can add different propulsion methods, flaps, different sensors, cameras, etc.
I need to learn more about the communication protocols as well. I see AT Commands over certain frequencies but what does this all mean? How can we encrypt it? How can we add redundancies?
7:00PM Status
I did get it flying. Flys pretty nice around the yard. Looking forward to building in automations/etc.
My name is Kevin Bartchlett, if you couldn’t tell. This site and the related social media is just a way for me to share my cool projects.
It acts not only as a resume of creations but hopefully available education to others on some of things I’ve learned. The ideas and projects are going to jump around and just be the cool stuff that I had fun creating.
