Tiltrotor support for plane

Thanks for the feedback and apologies for my ignorance. Which channels do my motor controllers plug into? Which channels do my servos plug into? What parameters do I have to set to make that work. Is there documentation which describes this setup, and also what tilt masks are available?

10ga wire and xt60 connectors on my battery werent nearly enough… Solder melted off the power module and sprayed the open connectors on my pixhawk. Bridging some of them. Just ordered some xt90 connectors so ill see how that goes.

@tridge,

Did you ever get the fireFly 6? Very interested to read your observations. I have a FF6 with AVA and am considering a switch to plane.

One of the features birdseyeview markets is wind assist. Do you have any thoughts about how this capability compares to wind corrections with plane?

Generally I am happy with Ava, but I don’t like that they stripped out mission planner functions.

Thanks for all your contributions to this community.

Dave

Meanwhile, we are fully satisfied with the tiltrotor firmware.

Next, Walter and I want to transfer the experience to a high-performance plane.
For the medical express 2018 unfortunately the preparation time for us is too short,
so we wish tridge and his team all the best. :wink:

in tilt quadplanes, allow tilt of motors to be used for forward thrust,

@tridge, is this already in beta6?

hi everyone, plane 3.8.0 is finally out, and I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who tested tiltrotors for this release, especially the ground-breaking testing by @Rolf
I’m sure we will have a lot more improvements to come with tiltrotor quadplanes, but this is a great milestone!

Hi Tridge, i would like to extend the thanks to my colleague @Walter, who designed and built “Mozart”. Thanks to you especially because during all the time with ever new master versions, there was not a single accident due to software errors !!!
Congratulations on this great release.

Rolf

yes, thanks to @Walter too for the great build!

The new docs for 3.8 include some more documentation on tilt-rotors:
http://ardupilot.org/plane/docs/guide-tilt-rotor.html
I think this could be expanded a lot. If there is anyone who would like to help improve the docs that would be much appreciated. Perhaps we should start with some diagrams, or pictures of real setups?

Is there anything in the code to use differential thrust for yaw control? My max bank angle is already 45 degrees and I’m doing B52 traffic patterns.

there is support for that in normal twin-motor planes, but not yet in tilt-rotors. It isn’t hard to add though.
Is your plane a tilt-tri?

Yes sir.

You should blog that: it’s very cool!

Arduplane tiltrotor firmware compensates for even pilot failures:

Rolf

1 Like

great video! thanks @Rolf

I did my first hover of a FireFlyY6 yesterday
New photo by Andrew Tridgell
I’ve had this plane for a while, kindly sent to me by Andy Trench. We finally got the build finished on a Saturday CanberraUAV build day, and did a first hover on Sunday.
The plane hovered fine, but the battery voltage and current has me stumped. I used the recommended 3S batteries, which are the high-capacity 3S multistars, 5.2Ah, two of them in parallel (one in each wing). In a 90 second hover the battery voltage dropped from 3.9volts/cell down to 2.6volts/cell. We landed it at that point as the voltage was well below the danger level.
The current logging shows a current draw in hover of around 80A, which is a lot more than I expected. Total power draw in hover was around 700W.
We’re clearly going well past the C rating of the battery, which is surprising as this is the recommended battery setup. Has anyone else flown the 3S default setup with the FireFly6? If so, do you have a flight log you could share so I can look at the voltage/current?
Cheers, Tridge

Tridge,

Thanks for the post. I am excited to see your progress. I’ve been thinking about ditching AVA for arduplane for quite some time.

Not sure about the recommendation for 3s batteries. Mine was shipped with two 5200 6s batteries.

Not sure if this helps you, but below please find a link to a log file from a recent FireFly6 flight.

Dave

Hello All,

I am new in the RC business, but I am working on a special tilt-rotor design, and plan to control it with QuadPlane. I have read through the tilt rotor doc, and as I see, not all functions are available, what I will need for it. How do you see?

The vehicle is a mixture of a + quadcopter and an aircraft. There are 2 rotors over the fuselage, and 2 others at the end of the wings. The 2 wing-rotors can tilt independently to work as prop or control yaw. The rotors are driven by a petrol engine, so all rotors have the same RPM. The angle of the rotor-blades is adjustable by servos. It does not have conventional aircraft control surfaces, because I would like use the rotors and the tilt wing-ends to control the aircraft mode as well. The main rotors are rotating also in aircraft mode, but the angle of the blades are around 0 deg, till no pitch control is needed. The main rotors can also help out the wings during transition to make it more safe.

Thanks

Laszlo

Lazlo, perhaps post some photos and/or video of your aircraft as well: it’s a pretty impressive build, and it would probably benefit you if people knew you were ready to test fly, rather than just having a “good idea” with some sketches.
Just a suggestion :wink:

Hi Tridge,

I missed your post above. I have two FF6s, one is set up for 3s and one for 6s. I can confirm that your power draw around 700w is correct. I suspect that your Multistar packs are probably bad. Many of the Multistar packs have been found to be over-rated on their 10C discharge capability. That being said, I use the same packs but mostly for the more efficient 6s setup.

This winter, I will also be interested in converting my 3s setup to APM. I may even convert it to 6s since my SunnySky motors have dropped in price. Here is a video of the 3s maiden flight from February. I could pull the logs from it if you like.

https://vimeo.com/205456180

That is really a lot, well it depens about what is your AUW at take off , obviously.
With my dual motor tailsitter. 1000g AUW, I was surprized by the small difference between vertical and normal flight.
I must say that my setup is a bit weird :4S battery, custom 650 kv Keda motors I had from an old project and 11" Graupner E-Props.