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Anyone fly rc planes?


redherring

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Hey Ali and Laz, looking at the ardupilot board myself now. Where did you get yours from and how much, struggling to find the latest board and a price. Also it needs a gps module because that isnt included on the main board? Have either of you used the osd with it? Its between this and just getting the storm osd but will only be able to use the RTH from the storm osd in a plane as it doesnt work for rotory wing. The ardupilot can be used in both planes and helis though cant it? Thank you, spent so long trying to make sense of it all.

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Where is this video everyone is shouting about mick?

 

Thanks ali, by saying if I want the real board are you implying there are fakes? I notice there is a great difference in prices. Regarding the GPS modules how much do they differ? there seems to be many different ones and its hard to make sense of it. Finally, Is loading the different firmware easy enough? Can this just be done within the accompanying software or do you need some programming knowledge?

 

Sorry so many questions, I have spent so long researching but am finding it hard to find exactly what I want to know. Lots of money so want to know its the right decision.

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I've had 300m out of the 433Mhz 3DR + Arduplane so far, haven't yet tried it any further.

 

bought some cloned boards from here:

 

eForChina - Single TTL 3DRobotics 3DR Radio Telemetry Kit 433Mhz for APM APM2

 

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

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Hey Ali and Laz, looking at the ardupilot board myself now. Where did you get yours from and how much, struggling to find the latest board and a price. Also it needs a gps module because that isnt included on the main board? Have either of you used the osd with it? Its between this and just getting the storm osd but will only be able to use the RTH from the storm osd in a plane as it doesnt work for rotory wing. The ardupilot can be used in both planes and helis though cant it? Thank you, spent so long trying to make sense of it all.

 

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

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