lazarus

in case you break that one as well you can get replacments here https://www.simplyplastics.com/catalog/discs/extruded-acrylic-round-discs/clear-extruded-acrylic-disc/c-24/c-94/p-269 set thickness to 1.5mm and Diameter to 34mm

Its been windy as hell here for the past week so not much air time to be had, it has given me time to work on my new fpv plane. Flies so much better than the skywalker x5 I had been using

just need to move your hand out the way quicker. I launch every thing with the prop spinning, some stuff wont even get off the ground with out power (skywalker x5 wing). ironically the gashes on my arm that have been healing for the past couple of weeks came from a plane with the prop at the front, a now some what over powered slow stick.

The tax bit isnt too bad it's that 8 quid that irks me. More often than not they haven't opened it (unlss they have some special way of putting you parcel back togeter so it looks unopened but stamped on). I'm pretty sure that HMRC are a government agency that we pay for through taxes, which they have already had from the things I buy, when it cost as much for tax and handling as the the item cost in the first place then they are definitely taking the mick.

Going with a naza on this one. Will be interested to hear how ot compares to the ardupilot.

royal mail are even worse. £3.50 import duty topped up with £8 handling charge for them to go through my stuff and charge me charge me that initial £3.50

well get some pics up then

that's a pretty serious quad you've got there

got mine from ebay for about £102 delivered with the ublox neo-6 gps module and the board made by RCTimer. with its open source nature all the board designs etc are freely downloadable so any one with the facilities to do it could start knockin them out. i've just recently ordered up a second board from ali express that's closer to £50 so i'll see how that compares. as for GPS, the ublox recievers have always got a better write up than the media tek for accuracy so if you building up a multirotor that would be the way i'd go. on a plane you can't stop and hold in place in the sky so i'd imagine its much of a muchness. I've compared the official ardupilot board, the RCTimer board and a very spurious board from ali express. ,the official and rctimer boards are pretty much identicle in components, quality and performance. the spurious board hasn't been flown yet, it did come with a slightly different version of the barometer sensor and was missing half the pins from the kit if you were to put it together as a top entry board but it did have all the side entry pins. hooked up to the mission planner all the sensor feedback looks good. guess we'll find out, my brother has that one destined for a 100+mph funjet as for the minimOSD, quite a nice unit easy to config and gets all its data from the ardupilot so its a nice small unit. if you do go down this route then i'll save you the lesson i learned. the printing that tells you which input pin is which is very misleading, it makes sense if your plugging in and FTDI cable as the 2 outer pins are labeled by cable coulour, but any pins inside that are all over. i followed the writing with a self made cable to hook up to the telemetry port and ended up pushing 5v straight into the rx line and burned the thing out. replace the first unit (which admittedly was suffering from a QC issue and was about 50% wider than it should be as they hadn't trimmed the board) with a second that is running nicely though still has the same dodgy printing on it. I've since managed to replace the processor chip on the first unit and get the firmware flashed back on and it lives again. after a crash with the quad while i was waiting for parts i pulled all the ardupilot stuff off and stuck it in a skywalker x-5 (this had been the intention when i started this project, but after having it on the quad i had to get another board for it). if your putting it on a plane that doesn't recover well from a low speed stall (as i discovered the x5 doesn't) then its definitely worth getting the airspeed sensor. gps works on for ground speed on a windless day but not much good if you have a tailwind. stuck the x-5 in the ground firstly when i was testing to see how slow the wing would fly (if it can recover then it needs more than 20m of vertical drop to do it) and secondly turning with a bit of a tailwind as i was turning round to land

thats interesting to hear, the range on mine is now down to about a meter and a half, definitely faulty i think. I've hopefully got another airside module been shipped over from the guy i bought it from. hope its not the airside i already have thats failing as well. my brother bought a set of the 868Mhz modules, testing those on the ground we've had about 1.7km so far and still had a solid link

Doesn't mean you cant stick another one on the front . Make it interesting

Its a classy ride mick. if no one claims it you could slap a motor on the front and have some thing to fly while the glue sets on the bixler

yes mick, in auto mode it flies its self, it also has a few other flight modes that are more use for general flying or FPV that help stabalise the copter, or get it to hold position when you let go of the sticks. also its nice to know that if you get out of range or get lost you can flick a switch and it will head home by its self. My goggles and video transmitter turned up the other day, so i'm getting to grips with fpv at the moment. it certainly helps with the confidence if you know that letting go of the sticks will leave it hanging in the sky and not blowing away. ali, i take it your trying to get it to focus on a point as its flying round. i've not tested it my self yet but as i understand, you set a ROI point at the begining of the mission and set the "yaw override behaviour" at the bottom of the advanced parameters page to "on mission restart". this should keep it pointing at the point as it flies round. if you set the command after the final way point as a RTL it will then turn towards home and fly back.

from my experience as long as you have stabalise working pretty well then mission flying is pretty reliable. though i will admit it was pretty nerve wracking flicking that switch for the first time.

the 915mhz band is but 868 is below it. as far as i understand it is set aside for telemetry transmissions, it does have restrictions about how much you can transmit on it (some thing like 20 seconds in every minute) so its a little iffy as far as ardupilots constant transmission but its better than 915 which is definitely illegal to use and congested with cell phone traffic. is yours a quad or are you still flying the original tri you built? i get a little bit of wobble when mine pauses briefly at a waypoint but nothing major, its pretty smooth while traveling and quite solid if i put it in loiter. this was flying totally by its self, my only part was to start the motors at the beginning and shut them off when it landed.