Hy,
(please excuse my poor english)
i was playing with rc-models my whole live. Ships, airplanes and helicopters (up to 450). Now i grew old, and my eyes are too bad to control an airplane. Ships are ok, but boring.
My question : if i would install an ardupilot (raspi ?) in one of my 450-er helis, can i let it fly save without direct rc.control (perhaps with fpv-control) ?
Welcome to the community,
Yes, it can but you need to add a proper flight controller like a CubeOrange and run ArduCopter firmware on it.
Iâve used the Holybro Pixhawk 6C Mini on a couple of 400 size helicopters. Works very well. The tune and setup of ardupilot for a helicopter is very different from setting up a traditional RC heli. Especially on an electric heli, there are no mixes or curves needed.
Youâll need RC control to get it set up and tuned, but after that you have a lot of options. As you get into it feel free to ask questions here.
https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/traditional-helicopters.html
Do you mean fly without a remote controller? Or do you mean use augmented stability flight modes instead of full-manual control?
You will not be able to fit a full CubeOrange and âraspiâ is not an autopilot. You will need some smaller Flight Controller due to very limited space of installation on the 450 class. Matek boards (like H743mini/slim) are to be preferred on this size of helis.
Yes, i would like to fly without rc, because i am not longer able to recognise the exact position and direction of flight. fast enough. i do thsi with boats, via gps and compass they are able to run a waypoint-course, even under sails. processors are arduino, raspi and esp32.
i thought, the raspi and some sensors as hardware would be fine, but perhaps a sepcialised âflightcontrollerâ (wich , in the end, is the same ?) would be easier to configure.
what i donât know is : is it realy possible to fly a heli in this way without any rc-support ?
Posting in the Ardupilot forum we are going to recommend a Flight Controller that runs Arducopter. While itâs certainly possible to fly a craft w/o an RC system you will need one to configure and tune the craft. There is really no way around that. After than sure, you can fly Auto Missions from a Ground Control station running on a laptop. Or with a companion computer more sophisticated flight options.
ok, well trained and optimised, a flightcontroller will control the heli without any manual help. fine !
is it nessecary to fly it manualy in the phase of training/calibrating the system ?
i did develop a flightcontroller by myself for a quadrocopter, and this was the problem : it crashed often, because programming the different flight-phases needed to do it ârealyâ in tests, and i was not able to control it by rc all the time.
Yes it is necessary to fly in stabilized mode during tuning.
I would suggest to always have a traditional rc control as backup in case of emergency.
Regardless of the setup you will choose you would need to consider two additional factors:
The term âstabilised fligth modeâ is used here.
Does that mean, that the heli would not crash, if i loose orientationn and stop controlling ? Does it stay stable and i can for example reduce hight until landing ?
No Stabilize means it will not oscillate or flip over, but it makes no effect on wind or other external sources.
Aka you need to fly it. Only in Auto or loiter is it really able to fly without user input.
sorry⌠what does âloiterâ mean in this context ?
Loiter is the term for âPosition Holdâ in autopilot.
See here.
Arducopter Flight Modes
Speaking as an 80-year-old granddad I am grateful for Arducopter. I have been flying my 500s and 550 with other flight controllers for about 15 years without any crashes but, because of my caution, without really progressing beyond a steady hover and gentle movements.
Arducopter has allowed me to fly with confidence. As others have said, you must be able to fly manually in âStabilizedâ mode to set it up and configure it, but then you can fly in any of the modes that give more assistance, such as âAltitude Holdâ or âPosition Holdâ or âLoiterâ. I generally fly in Stabilised or Altitude Hold mode but I have a momentary switch programmed to put it into Position Hold mode so that I can park it while I think about what to do next. As a last resort I can select Return to Launch and the heli will come back by itself to the spot where it took off from.
Hello Allan,
thanks a lot for your friendly and very interesting text.
i am in exactly the same situation, i was able to control hoover and gentle movements. circles or nose-to-nose hoovering was risky.
I need assistance now, and i thnik i found it in ardupilot.
what i didnât know : ardupilot is much more than an arduino, some imu-sensors and some code. when i started developing my own flight-controller more then 10 years ago, ardupilot was in this level. they began to integrate telemetrie, i triec it with an commercial osd. but today, ardupilot seems to me as a whole universe of applications, developed on professional level.
i first need to get an overview and i will try to understand the basic principals. for example âposition holdâ was a problem, i never found any solution for. even to find a sensor-physics with acceptable cost and weight was impossible.
i am very, very curious !
Reliable operation of Ardupilot requires the correct flight controller board and, for many functions, a GPS. Youâll find a list of the recommended boards here.
I started with a (rather expensive) mRo Pixracer board, which was recommended by forum users, but since it developed a fault Iâve been using Matek H743 boards without any in-use problems. The Matek boards (and others in the 'Closed Hardware list) do need Ardupilot installing on them, which can be a bit of a challenge, but thereâs plenty of advice in this forum on how to achieve it.
@kannix My advice would be to build a new copter. I used to fly both copters and helis. 3 times more helis, to be honest.
I found copters more stable and easy to build, tune and fly.
Just and advice.
Yes, i agree. I built copters and helis years ago by myself.
In developing copter-software, in the end i had no more progress. the machines were able to fly, the axis-control worked fine. holding height on qir-pressure was working. but real autopilots, with waypoint-fly and hold position was unreachable.
gps had not enough resolution, experiments with optical systems failed.
in modern times, copters for children do their job much better 
Helis are much more interesting. itâs nice to play with the rotorheads (especially with no electronics, but with paddles), the flight-physics itself is more impressing.
my dream would be a heli not too expencive (not too large, but large enough for some stability : a 450 !), with electroinc support which allows me to fly it despite my old eyes and my slow reaction, and in a second step, to add some own software. i think ardupilot is open source, and i hope, interfaces are documented in a way i can understand.
Yes, you can modify code for sure. I used to code to suite it to my hardware. Or just go with predefined configs for simplicity.