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Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

It is the wicking kind designed for post-assembly use, but's also slightly weaker than blue. Not much, but it is. Purple (food-safe) is the weakest.

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Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

What part of the world is that? It's very pretty. Utah? Wyoming? Colorado?

e: hah I googled "Popwing" to find out what it was and the first link is another of your videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdVTgBOWhzI

Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 21:14 on May 1, 2013

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

You could also try one of these:

http://www.amazon.com/Parrot-AR-Dro...ds=ar+drone+2.0

The reason this kind of thing is recommended for new flyers is the same reason folks in Cycle Asylum recommend a used, somewhat beat-up motorcycle to first-time riders: you're going to accidentally damage it, and you want to mitigate the cost of that as much as possible. Consumer-grade RC stuff is durable enough to withstand a few crashes without needing a bunch of expensive replacement parts, and you can get going right out of the box instead of having to learn to build the whole thing over many weeks only to crash and break it thirty seconds into the first flight. Ask me how I know!

Battery life isn't going to get much better than 7-10 minutes, especially if you're carrying the extra weight of a GoPro. Larger batteries will help somewhat but you're still going to have to carry the extra weight around, so you won't get as much additional time as you expect. If you want really long radio-control flights, you should be looking at the sailplanes and motor gliders.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

That was really fast. You found one in stock at a store somewhere?

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

After not doing radio-control stuff for quite a while, I started reading through this thread and found out about ER9x. Got out my old Turnigy 9x, opened it up, soldered in the ISP points, flashed the new firmware with one of my Arduinos. This is SO MUCH BETTER! Goddamn, open-source software efforts can really do some amazing stuff. I don't even understand what half the new functions are for, but just the main screen and calibration system is such a gigantic improvement.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Just FYI regarding LiPo chargers I have a Turnigy Accucel-6 and it's been just great. I've even (extremely slowly) charged a completely dead car battery back to full functionality with it (and the battery continues to be functional like 2 years later). Not the fastest or highest power on the market but it's just a good piece of equipment overall, and it's cheap.

http://hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__7028__Turnigy_Accucel_6_50W_6A_Balancer_Charger_w_accessories.html

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

babyeatingpsychopath posted:

Trying to get action shots of waterskiing/tubing, and it'd be nice to be able to launch/recover the craft from a boat at speed.

Well, before you try the recovery, I'd suggest that you invest in some protective equipment. Something like this ought to do

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Yeah, my reaction to flying my 450-size helicopter when I first got it (after only flying small things with plastic rotors before) was "holy poo poo, I'm driving around an unstable, unguarded flying lawnmower :stare:"

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

There's one in Automotive Insanity, yep: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3125553

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Flying close to people is stupid. The video kind of speaks for itself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocqB6_y71xE

(no gore or anything, just stupidity)

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

How does the quadcopter know when a prop has been lost? Tachometers on each motor looking for overspeeds?

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Oh, I see. So on a hexacopter, if you lose one prop the two motors beside it on that "side" will increase their power by ~66% (well all three motors will increase power) as the machine compensates for the roll. It'll wobble, but stabilize itself if you have enough altitude. Right?

But on a quadcopter there's no way to compensate so it just spins and falls.

I do wonder, though, if you could save it by monitoring motor current. If a prop flies off or flies apart, that motor (under less load) is going to start drawing a lot less current, and you could theoretically detect that drop vs. the other motors, assign it as damaged and do...something. Deploy a parachute? :v:

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Well yeah it wouldn't be possible with a stock quadcopter. I think the best way to do it would be with inline current sensors going to your Ardupilot. Or to a little external ATMega watchdog that alerts the flight controller if anything is wrong.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Jim Silly-Balls posted:

It would be based on load, not RPM, because the computer is telling a brushless motor what RPM to run at.

Yeah I realized that about 30 seconds after I posted it. :downs:

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Symbolized posted:


This pocket quad is surprisingly stable. Runs on multiwii and, with the pitch/roll rates high enough, is really acrobatic. It is decently hard to break, too.

I assume that's this HobbyKing quad, right? It says it needs a DSM radio...I'm a bit foggy on radio terminology but could I plug a transmitter module like this one into my Turnigy 9X (w/ ER9x) and fly it?

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

I'm not sure that flight sims are needed; they can help but nothing really compares to time operating the real machine. There's a reason you can't get a pilot's license from flight simulators alone. You'll learn more from crashes, I think.

Definitely install the landing gear and take it slow, though. If you have the option, try reducing your control throws so that the thing doesn't turn as fast, and only ever use part throttle.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

rotaryfun posted:

So I did end up making it out to the precision flying air contest that the local club I found was having on Saturday and completely left there defeated.

I found the guy I had made contact with and started chatting. Told him about the RTF champ that I bought and all the parts/controller for the flitetest.com projects. Essentially said that I had wasted my money buying Chinese garbage and that I need to be careful of what people on the internet say as any kind of advice.

If you can make your plane fly, and you have fun doing it, you haven't wasted your money. All hobbies are going to have the gear wackos who just treat it as another sort of consumerist penis-extension, but there *are* some people out there who do the hobby because they love it and love teaching other people all the cool stuff about it. If you go back, try to ignore the comments from the insecure pricks who have to justify why they aren't having any more fun than you despite having spent twenty times as much. Instead, shop around and find those people who just do the hobby for its own sake. They'll generally be the old guys with old or beat-up looking stuff who spend more time listening and watching than talking.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

mashed_penguin posted:

:stare: x 10000

Now I know my fear of any heli bigger than a 450 is justified.

I have a 450 and I barely fly it because it's goddamned terrifying. The first time I powered it up I immediately realized "I am about to fly a dynamically unstable, totally unguarded fiberglass lawnmower all over this park at low altitudes and high speeds." I can't imagine flying the 500s and larger, or god forbid the really big ones with metal blades. :stonk:

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

How does the motor index to the correct location and hold that point? Are they basically operating as stepper motors with like twenty poles?

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

rotaryfun posted:

Yeah I did all my batteries to XT60's and I've soldered the bullet connectors on my motors and esc's. So it's not that I "can't", I'm just not very confident with it. I worry about my solder points disconnecting every time I disconnect my batteries. I certainly don't pull them apart by the cables though so it's more of an irrational fear.

Even if you did pull them apart by the cables, a good solder joint is going to be stronger than the wires it's joining. You're more likely to snap the cable just in front of the joint than to pull the solder off.

If you are having problems with the solder disconnecting, several things could be going on -- too much heat, too little heat, not enough flux, etc -- but it's definitely a user error. Solder is quite strong.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

I'd imagine they would have a pretty big problem with people shooting them down for free stuff.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

If you can't see the difference between a UAV delivering crates of ammo to soldiers in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan and a UAV delivering pocky to shut-in neckbeards in the middle of a dense urban core I don't know what to tell you.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Oh, I missed the part where we were talking about what it's going to be like 20 years from now. You know, like it would have made sense to hypothesize in 1993 about what telephones of 2013 would look like, before anyone had heard the word "web browser".

Delivery of products to the average civilian in the middle of a city by quadcopter drone is technologically feasible today, but logistically impossible. I'll be happy to come back to the discussion in 2034 though.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Vitamin J posted:

In labs UAVs are able to fly through incredibly tight obstacle courses and small holes, fly tightly in formation, and avoid other moving objects. Can you show me anything similar for cars? You have already admitted that unmanned ground delivery is impossible because of liability issues.

No. No no no no no no no nooooooooooooooo

Vitamin J posted:

You are a year or two out of date at least. Modern UAVs can do this with on-board sensors. The experiments using external sensors are helpful for developing algorithms and fine tuning.

No they loving can't. Those labs where they demo the quads playing tennis and flying through loops and poo poo are not even remotely a real-world scenario. The quads aren't even doing the processing on board. The entire space is a motion-capture stage bathed in infrared light and modeled to millimeter accuracy. The quads and every single important item have retroreflective markers on them, and there is a rack of servers out of the frame doing all the motion analysis and processing and radioing movement commands. Please show me a system that can generate a real-time 360-degree map of its environment at sub-millimeter accuracy and process data that currently requires a bank of servers and the associated electrical power to handle, but miniaturized to quadcopter scale and powerable with batteries that need to also power the main drive motors.

e: before you post that MIT video again, that one is also using an existing digital map of its (extremely simple and completely static) environment. It cannot scan the environment in real time, cannot determine what is an obstacle and what is not, cannot react to changing situations. It's impressive stuff but all it is demonstrating is motion-estimating algorithms that can accurately map the plane's location to a pre-existing static 3D map. It should be obvious why that is insufficient for anything you're proposing.

Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Dec 10, 2013

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

A guy I know is building a quadcopter. He is sort of crazy and sometimes talks about how much weight he thinks it can carry and how "I could easily put a pistol on there, just so you know." I'm thinking like "I really don't think I should be listening to this and/or I should be reporting you to some authorities and/or you're the guy who is going to get civilian quadcopters outlawed."

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Trabisnikof posted:

Then why won't the FAA say that? The FAA is unwilling to officially state that commercial drone use is illegal. So unless you know more about the rules than the FAA, I wouldn't be so sure.

They didn't talk to "the FAA", they talked to "a guy at the FAA." It's not surprising that one guy would be unwilling to give any statement on such a controversial topic until the FAA has made a public announcement of one kind of another. Like, I really, really wouldn't want to be the random guy on the phone who shot his mouth off about the legality of drones and is quoted in a hundred newspapers before his boss even gets in the next morning.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Trabisnikof posted:

If by "a guy at the FAA" you mean the FAA Spokesman, the person who's job it is to be the official face of the rules of the FAA.


What difference does that make? If the FAA has no current rule on the subject -- and you can guarantee that it's under debate right now, so it's not like they're just farting around and ignoring it -- he isn't going to give you any statement one way or the other. "The FAA has no rule on this" is just as committal a response as "you can do whatever you like."

Would you be surprised if you phoned up your state government and asked them "hey, what's going to happen with marijuana legalization around here?" and they evaded the question?

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

HobbyKing has simple 2-axis servo gimbal hardware for like $20 (Add two servos for another 20 bucks and you're good). Or if you have a friend with a 3D printer, there are zillions of them on Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/search/page:1?q=gimbal&sa=

Then you just put whatever camera you want on the plate and away you go.

For tracking objects you'd probably want one of the self-stabilizing brushless gimbal setups though. They do a way better job of keeping the camera steady, which would be a prerequisite to getting any sort of reliable image processing going. Also a GoPro doesn't have a video-out that can feed directly into a computer but you probably knew that already.

The bigger problem would be the software, I think. If you had a fixed platform, and you basically had a white background, visual flow to pick out moving colored objects would be pretty simple. Start doing things like moving the platform, or trying to decide which of several moving objects to focus on...that's hard.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

How do you get a live feed from the GoPro without the wifi? I didn't know that was possible.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012


:eyepop:

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

I dunno how you define "maximum possible damage", though. Crashing on someone's car while it's parked is pretty different from crashing on someone's car while it's driving down the highway. And I've love to see what happens when you crash a bunch of carbon-fiber rods into a high-tension line.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

4s = about 14-16 volts, right? And you're probably going to be drawing <100mA to run the camera, right? Just buy a 7812 linear regulator for like 75 cents and solder it in before your ESC/UBEC.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Most of those 7800 series are rated for about an amp or two of continuous current as long as they're attached to some sort of heat sink (usually soldering to the ground plane of the board works fine, actually) so I imagine your idea is solid. It's certainly the cheapest way to go.

You can probably also find a premade 12v buck converter somewhere, and it would have pretty high efficiency if it's only dropping that small amount of voltage, but it would probably be larger than a linear regulator + heat sink and certainly would be more expensive.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

tehk posted:

Should I add capacitors on the input and output to avoid any oscillation issues? I have it working without but I feel like I should know better than to put something so simple and cheap in the air. If it comes to adding a filter as well I might just stick with the extra battery. Too many points of failure at this point and I trust this little lipo

Depends. I wouldn't worry about HF noise as the battery itself does a good job of stabilizing that sort of thing. I suppose you could get induced HF on the output lines but that's a lot less common with brushless motors than with the old brushed cans and their spark gaps. It's *possible* that your motor and battery are sized in a way that if you suddenly slammed the throttle from 0 to 100% the battery voltage would temporarily droop (talking about a matter of milliseconds), and if it goes below the linear regulator's minimum dropout voltage you could have problems. A decently sized electrolytic capacitor on the output would help with any ripples like that. However, you don't really know if that's even something you need to worry about unless you hook it up and watch it on an oscilloscope. Do you have access to one?

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC89KRV7l9M

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Erwin posted:

Seems fake. As soon as the pumpkin hits, the camera is immediately on the ground and spinning, and then you can see a guy in the video at 30 seconds, but then apparently it took them 4 hours to find the camera. Not sure why though, because the actual shot of the pumpkin seems real, as if it barely missed the drone but they decided to make it look like it hit instead? I think a shot of a pumpkin from a cannon whizzing by would be just as impressive.

Pumpkin cannons exist. Camera drones exist. Is it really that hard to believe that a 200mph+ flying pumpkin could veer slightly off course and hit the drone? Go to the youtube link, the guy's posted pictures of the damage.

The camera spins while it's falling, not when it's on the ground, and I can tell you from experience that finding something lost in the woods is way more difficult than it seems, even if "I swear I just saw it land right here."

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Or you could just notice that the Google cars have a LIDAR on the roof that apparently works fine at highway speeds, ~30m/s.

Granted that's a $70,000 unit with weight and power consumption way out of the range of a small UAV, but it shows that it's possible.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

I don't think a 4 year old anything can handle raw 4k video.

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Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

My :spergin: sense is highly offended by his use of "warp drive" instead of "hyperdrive", and that he (like about 99% of the internet) calls an aileron roll a barrel roll :spergin:

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