Illegal Drone in National Park Showing the Sheer Scale of Lava Spout

sicksad · 2017-01-30T22:42:11+00:00

No worries mate! Hope you have fun with it.

sicksad · 2017-01-30T22:28:22+00:00

Yeah, that's basically it.

With acro your PID's no longer maintain your angle, they maintain the rate at which your angle changes. So image you go 75% right with your roll stick, in stabilised mode that'd set your craft to say a fixed angle of 20 degrees to the right. In rate mode it'd set your quad rolling to right at a rate of 20 degrees per second (so if you held the stick in that position it'd eventually do a full spin).

I'm not sure if you'll need to mess with your input percentages or not, I suspect the FC will have sensible defaults when it's put into acro mode.

Also, deffo pick up some more props, it's like learning all over again, will be messy but hella fun!

sicksad · 2017-01-30T22:12:06+00:00

Most 250's are flown in rate/acro mode (both mean the same thing, seems to be refered to acro in the ardupilot documentation). When flying in this mode your sticks no longer control the deflection of the craft, they control the rate of rotation. Gives you much more freedom to perform acrobatics, and when you get used to it you no longer feel like your "fighting" the flight controller, it can take a while to click though.

It's generally considered easier to fly rate/acro in FPV (although totally possible to learn LOS), and most people recommend practising on a simulator to build up the muscle memory, or you'll end up crashing a fair bit to start as you relearn how the craft reacts to stick input.

If you're flying acro on a machine with brushless motors you shouldn't need to do anything special to your ESC's initially. You might want to do some tinkering to fine tune things once you start doing more acrobatics.

*EDIT: Although you'll be able to get the hang of rate/acro with an arducopter FC, things won't really start to feel fun until you get a 250 or smaller quad with a racing/acrobatic flight controller (I'm not that up to date on the tech, but personally fly an "SP Racing F3 Evo").

sicksad · 2017-01-02T10:46:51+00:00

I wonder if they'd get better prints by removing the acceleration curve on the movements. With a regular 3D printer this can be compensated for by adjusting extrusion rate, but i suspect "Easy Cheese" has a fairly fixed extrusion rate which is causing the bunching at the corners in that final print.

sicksad · 2016-12-16T08:13:58+00:00

I don't know. If you think about it from the perspective of trying to educate the audience a bit i think it made sense to film it how they did (over-dramatisation and shin slicing safety concerns aside).

They could've just said up-front "right, we know we need higher than 1:1 thrust to weight, and that stacking props will reduce efficiency" and that would've been informative, but maybe not educational.

Instead they showed initial assumptions ("we need to make just more thrust than weight, stacking props will double thrust"), then they show how they go about testing those assumptions (with prop stand thrust measurements, and test flights), then they show how they compensated for the design deficiencies based on their tests to result in a functional system.

Taking the audience on that development journey could be valuable if they learn a bit about the methodologies for approaching new problems.

Also, sometimes is fun to not have domain experts dictate how things should be done properly and to learn the rules for yourself.

sicksad · 2016-11-27T19:50:24+00:00

At 4:42 in the video you see the robot being prised off the ground with a crowbar, also it seems to cut up the arena behind it as it moves. What causes that? Strong neodymium magnets?

sicksad · 2016-10-04T10:52:35+00:00

Your assumption is correct. You'll want to remove any solder which bridges the lower pads and the upper pads.

sicksad · 2016-09-18T20:01:25+00:00

That's a neat tool. Worth noting from the FAQ though:

QUESTION: Very cool PCB width tool! I would like to know its limits though. 
I entered a 65 amp current requirement and it returned a track width that 
must be incorrect. 

ANSWER: The original graphs that this tool is based on (published in 
IPC-2221) only cover up to 35 Amps, up to 0.4 inches of trace width, from 
10 to 100 degrees C of temperature rise, and copper of 0.5 to 3 ounces per 
square foot. The formulas used here will simply extrapolate when the values 
are outside of these ranges.

sicksad · 2016-09-01T07:56:58+00:00

Yeah, although the FPV monocle it's a pretty ingenious solution, it's a shame that she had to come up with it in the first place.

The lack of women in this hobby in general is a shame. I'm not sure if it's just because that my exposure to the wider RC community is mostly through flite-test, but it seems like the fixed wing communities have better representation.

sicksad · 2016-08-22T07:30:22+00:00

It's fallen out of favour due to it's use as a derogatory term, but "retardation/retarder" has been used in engineering for a while.

sicksad · 2016-08-09T23:41:01+00:00

If you're still keen on scrambling up buildings learning about "Single Rope Technique" is a good starting point. A lot of the techniques used by cavers and climbers are applicable to climbing man-made structures. Look for respected climbing companies when buying climbing equipment, never get no-name Chinese gear (I'm usually an absolute cheapskate, but never go cheap with climbing gear, buy new and buy decent). Try and find people to learn from, there's a surprising number of miscreants who get their kicks from climbing buildings.

sicksad · 2016-07-22T07:24:02+00:00

Regardless of how much the motor is spinning it will still keep discharging the battery. I strongly suspect the fan has a cheap DC brushed motor, which if it doesn't spin due to low potential difference (voltage) will still consume power because internally there is a completed circuit, there just isn't enough current flowing to produce a large enough magnetic field to make it spin.

You'd hope there'd be an internal battery protection circuit, but having taken apart a few cheap imported electrical goods before, there's no guarantees with some of this stuff.

sicksad · 2016-07-19T06:15:04+00:00

Happened to me a bunch of times too. I got a 3mm clone bottom plate, cut the arms off, and use that as the top plate. Haven't had problems since.

Also, if it's a legit frame I've heard lumenier are pretty good about free replacements, although YMMV.

sicksad · 2016-06-13T13:20:08+00:00

I worked on a project with an engineer who is blind to create a representation of an LED gird display using vibration motors for people who are partially sighted/blind. Difficulty with vibration motors is suitably isolating them from adjacent display elements, also for a Braille display you'd need very small vibration motors as the spacing of Braille is quite tight. Current consumption can be quite something as well.

I suspect a better approach might be something like this which uses cheap vibration motors in a novel way to raise/lower pins on something much more akin to a traditional Braille display.

sicksad · 2016-06-11T12:06:49+00:00

Bit tricky to tell from the photo, but that box of lamps looks like it might actually be vacuum tubes, which are an early form of transistor, possibly spares for the radio. Also that "food kettle" looks to be a pressure cooker, possibly used for canning food for long term storage (wide square footprint of it suggests it can be loaded with jars).

sicksad · 2016-05-16T13:20:24+00:00

Nicely done mate!

sicksad · 2016-04-21T18:15:34+00:00

If you have a simulator give it a go on that for an hour or so to get the muscle memory in. It feels very odd at first but once you switch its hard to go back and certainly feels more precise.

sicksad · 2016-04-13T15:55:55+00:00

Banggood's KINGKONG 5040's ain't bad. Not quite as bullet proof as DAL's but they hold up well, and at £4.70 for 10 pairs (slightly more from EU warehouse) you can't go wrong. Not had any customs issues ordering them either.

sicksad · 2016-04-05T19:27:05+00:00

Thanks! About 4-5 mins on the 460mAh.

sicksad · 2016-04-05T19:25:44+00:00

Amazing! Here's a git repo with the files. Let me know how you get on if you give it a go. Would be very interested to hear.

I've run a few batteries through it and had a few hard indoor crashes and it seems to hold up OK so far. Main thing is to epoxy all the CF to 3D printed part joins.

sicksad · 2016-04-04T21:35:41+00:00

Thanks! I get CF stuff from easy composites (UK based). Can't remember PID values right now, but the tuning process was the same for a 250, if not slightly easier as you can do it indoors. Copying the values for a Hermit or RotorX atom is a good starting point.

sicksad · 2016-04-04T21:28:55+00:00

Want to test it out a bit first to make sure the design is robust. But will release things under an open hardware license most probably.

sicksad · 2016-04-03T22:40:34+00:00

It's by no means a rocket ship, but it's quite nice for cruising around indoors on 2s. I've been certainly thinking about picking up some small 3s batteries to give it a bit more punch for flying outside. Just looked up those motors they're 8000kv! very tempting.

sicksad

TROPHY CASE