Race Drone: Build, Fly, Crash, Repeat!
Modified by Amir on the 26. Apr 2018 at 17:34 in FPV | Permalink

Finally, sommer is comming! The long, long winter is over. Ice and snow have melted. It is starting to get warmer and we finally have got nice and dry weather to fly!

I've repaired all my race drones during the winter and so I have currently 3 different race drones to fly:

  • X210 with Emax 2205 motors, 5S battery and 5" 5040 propellers
  • Chameleon with Emax 2306 motors, 5S battery and 5" 5045 Cyclon propellers
  • GEPRC with Brotherhobby Tornado 1407 motors, 4S battery and 3" 3045 Cyclon propellers

We fly these race drones with FPV goggles and remote control with a spotter beside us to make sure to comply to flight regulations given out by the BAZL (Bundesamt für Zivilluftfahrt in Switzerland). Depending on the place we fly we even coordinate our flights with the CTR Duebendorf, should those places be inside the controlled airspace of the militaery airfield Duebendorf (DUB).

If you are wondering how the gear looks we are using, check out the picture below. You can see there my remote control, my box goggles and my Chameleon race drone: I have a prepacked backpack containing everything I need to fly. It contains my remote control, my batteries, my 3 race drones, my modded box goggles, my repair gear as well as my reserve propellers. I will show you a picture of my backpack in another blog post.

Our motto is Build, Fly, Crash, Repeat! - So that's what we do.

Last sunday we were out to fly at a new place. The location has wide fields, trees at different locations and even a single detached tree ideal for some tree dancing. Which we did, or better tried.

Here are some impressions of those flights:

FPV || Tree dancing with my Chameleon
Download: mp4 (1280x720, 640x360)
Play on: YouTube
Sometimes there are evil ghost branches jumping out of the trees and into the copter, resulting in hefty crashes:
FPV || Tree dancing, ghost branches and a hefty crash
Download: mp4 (640x360, 1280x720)
Play on: YouTube
Most of the times the copter survives without damage. Sometimes it does not.

To make your race drone fly optimaly you need to check out the sensor data, and data fusion algorithms sometimes. I did a blackbox log of one of the flights and combined the sensor data with the flight movie using an overlay. That way you see copter movement and sensor data at the same time and one can evaluate the flight performance.

So, that's it for now. Expect more blog posts from me in the near future, now that I have a completly rewritten modern, static and secure, nice and shiny blog software to play with.

Cheers!
- Amir

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