A Collective Pitch Quadcopter

December 4, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 46 Comments

Quadcopters aren’t a new thing, but for all the advances in multi-rotor craft, they all still fall into the paradigm of, ‘stick a prop on a motor and repeat three more times. [Curtis Youngblood], one of the top RC heli pilots in the world, came up with a very cool drive system for a quad, requiring only one motor and granting each blade collective pitch that allows for absolutely insane acrobatic ability.

There’s only one motor inside the Stingray 500, as [Curtis] calls his new toy. It’s at the rear of this quad’s H-frame, attached to a shaft running down the spine with a pair of pulleys. All four rotors are driven by this spinning shaft.

Because [Curtis] is an acrobatic pilot, he needed a way to control his ‘copter in more than one direction. To do this, he added four servos on each arm of the quad, giving each rotor collective pitch, just like the tail rotor of a real helicopter. The result is a quadcopter that can fly upside-down with the greatest of ease, perform barrel rolls, and all the other maneuver a true 3D RC ‘copter can do.

The awesome guys at Flite Test had [Curtis] visit their hangar and had him do an awesome demo flight. You can check out that video below.

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Hacking A Cheap Toy Quadcopter To Work With Arduino

November 19, 2013 by Marsh 11 Comments

Building your own quadcopter is an expensive and delicate ordeal. Only after you navigate a slew of different project builds do you feel confident enough to start buying parts, and the investment may not be worth your effort if your goal is to jump right into some hacking. Fortunately, [Dzl] has a shortcut for us; he reverse engineered the communication protocol for a cheap toy quadcopter to work with an Arduino.

The cheap toy in question is this one from Hobbyking, which you can see flying around in their product demonstration video. [Dzl] cracked open the accompanying control handset to discover which transceiver it used, then found the relevant datasheet and worked out all the pin configuration involved in the SPI communication. Flying data is transmitted as 8 byte packets sent every 20 mS, controlling the throttle, yaw, pitch and roll.

[Dzl] took the build a step further, writing an Arduino library (direct Dropbox download link) that should catch you up to speed and allow you to skip straight to the fun part: hacking and experimenting! See his quick video after the break, then convince yourself you need a quadcopter by watching this one save its creator, [Paul], the trouble of walking his son to the bus stop.

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Should All Quadrotors Look Like This?

November 16, 2013 by James Hobson 53 Comments

In recent years, quadrotors have exploded in popularity. They’ve become cheap, durable, and can do some really impressive things, but are they the most efficient design? The University of Queensland doesn’t think so.

Helicopters are still much more efficient and powerful due to their one big rotor, and with the swashplate mechanism, perhaps even more maneuverable — after all did you see our recent post on collective pitch thrust vectoring? And that was a plane! A few quick searches of helicopter tricks and we think you’ll agree.

The new design, which is tentatively called the Y4, or maybe a “Triquad” is still a quadrotor, but it’s been jumbled up a bit, taking the best of both worlds. It has a main prop with a swashplate mechanism, and three smaller rotors fixed at 45 degree angles, that provide the counter torque — It’s kind of like a helicopter with three tails.

Regarding efficiency, the researchers expect this design could achieve an overall increase of about 25% in performance, compared to that of a standard quadrotor. So, they decided to test it and built a quad and a Y4 as similar as possible — the same size, mass, batteries, arms, and controller board. The results? The Y4 had an increased run time of 15%! They think the design could very well make the 25% mark, because in this test study, the Y4 was designed to meet the specifications of the quad, whereas a more refined Y4 without those limitations could perhaps perform even better.

Unfortunately there’s no video we can find, but if you stick around after the break we have a great diagram of how (and why) this design works!

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Remote Control FPV Cockpit

November 7, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

cockpit

FPV flying, for how awesome it actually is, still consists of fiddling around with a remote control transmitter and either wearing video goggles or squinting into a screen. Awesome, yes, but not as cool as [Brett Hays]’s enclosed cockpit ground station. It’s a trailerable flight sim that allows you to have the same experience of flying an aircraft over your local terrain without actually leaving the ground.

The centerpiece for this build is a 42 inch flat screen TV that was picked up for $160. This was placed at the front of a large plywood and 2×2 box along with a computer joystick, throttle, and rudder controls.

The pots inside the controls needed to be switched out to match the resistance of the ones inside an old Futaba transmitter. From there, completing the the cockpit was just a matter of fabricating a few panels for a video switcher, gear retract lever, flaps. and RC radio settings.

It’s a truly amazing build and when placed on a trailer towed by [Brett]’s jeep, has the potential to be the closest thing to flying a manned aircraft you can get without a pilot’s license.

Videos of the cockpit in action below.

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DIY Mini Quadcopter Frame Is Light And Strong

October 28, 2013 by Adam Fabio 7 Comments

quadcopter-frame

[Oscar] has been busy lately building DIY mini quadcopters. We saw his controller design earlier in the month. Back then he was using it with his walking robot designs. Now [Oscar] has posted up some information on his quadcopter work. Even though [Oscar] is new to mini quads, he began by designing his own frame. He started his frame design by using a cut down version of the well-known 949 frame. [Oscar] chose polystyrene for his motor mounts, which turned out to be the downfall of the frame. Polystyrene proved to be much too flimsy to handle the vibrations of the motors and props. The vibrations were transmitted to the accelerometers, which resulted in a model that was very hard to control. You can see this in the first video after the break.

For his second attempt, [Oscar] started with a proven design from HobbyKing. HobbyKing’s fiberglass mini quadcopter frame is sturdy, but heavy, and expensive to replace (If the parts are even in stock). The frame did work though, so he used it as a starting point for his second DIY frame. The new frame is based upon fiberglass shafts. [Oscar] used hot glue to join the shafts to the motor mounts. Each joint was wrapped in string, which was then coated with hot glue. We’d suggest thin cyanoacrylate glue in the future for these types of joints. Only a few drops of CA soaks up into the string, creating an extremely light and strong joint. [Oscar’s] frame ended up at about half the weight of the HobbyKing frame, but was stiff enough for a successful flight test, as can be seen in the second video after the break.

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Heavy Lifting Copters Can Apparently Lift People

September 20, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

Online RC store Hobby King is once again encouraging people to push the limits of what quadcopters and other multirotor remote control vehicles can do. They call it the beerlift and the goal is simple: build a multirotor craft capable of carrying the greatest amount of beer (or water, everything is measured by weight).

The competition is over, but the results were spectacular. The vehicle with the largest lift capacity – pictured above – was built by [Olaf Frommann] and carried 58.7 kilograms, or nearly 128 pounds to a hover a few feet off the ground. Last year the biggest lift was a mere 47 kg with an eight-rotor craft.

It was still an impressive showing all around. The biggest lift in the 700 class – 700 mm from rotor to rotor – was done by [David Ditch] with 19.6 kg. You can check out some of the best entries below, including an amazing aerobatic quadcopter that can successfully loop carrying a cup of beer,

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An Absurdly Small Tri-copter

August 24, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

The team behind the Femtoduino – an extraordinarily small repackaging of the Arduino – sent in a few videos from YouTuber [phineasIV], a.k.a. [Eric] that shows one of the smallest multicopters we’ve ever seen.

Because this isn’t a traditional quad or hexcopter, the control system is a little weird. Two of the motors and props are fixed along the vertical axis, while the rear prop is connected to a small servo to rotate from side to side. Still, the electronics are fairly standard for any multi rotor vehicle – a triple-axis gyro provides the stability of the vehicle coupled with MultiWii, while an amazingly small servo receiver, Bluetooth module,, Femtoduino, and a trio of brushless ESCs tie everything together.

The end result is a tri-copter that weighs about the same as the Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter, but is just a bit smaller. As impressive as it is on video (seen below), we’d love to see this tiny robotic hummingbird in person.

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