Actually, I don’t really know how other than to build a tricopter as awesome as mine. Earlier last month, I flew my tricopter up to about 80 feet above the ground to test its range as well as controllability. Due to a shortage of my usual propellers, I had been flying with an oversized tail [...]
Or, the best one-line bug fix ever. For two months, I had been thinking I was running my flight controller at 166 Hz while actually running it at a measly 31 Hz. I don’t want to go into detail about how that happened, but I have fixed the problem, and now it works. I am [...]
Multirotor flight control requires an update frequency on the order of hundreds of cycles per second. Most ESCs sold for RC plane use are capable of reading a PPM input at frequencies of up to 400 Hz, but they do not translate the PPM input to motor speed output at the same rate. tl;dr: Flash [...]
I changed how I set motor values (among other things) and invalidated my old PID gains. I figured out some new ones. Here’s a video of the current PID control behavior:
I thought it would be useful to have a way to test control of a single axis of the tricopter in a safely constrained manner, so I built a rig to do so: The rig is made of scrap aluminum I found in the room bolted to a cutting board that is clamped to the [...]
The OSU Aerial Team uses a rectangular aluminum frame to constrain the movement of our bicopter while we develop our flight controller. While this works, it is a very unnatural way to limit the movements of a flying vehicle. The cage limits 3D motion such that almost any flight stability test goes awry because the [...]
Curse my impatience. I got wired control pretty much working, so I went ahead and hooked up my XBees (wireless link) for testing. I had my hand on the chassis just in case, but I guess I didn’t apply enough pressure—it went full throttle on its own (I had barely touched the joystick) and flew [...]