Autorotation - why you need to know it

Chris, I reckon you walk away from that auto with a smile on your dial! :sunglasses:

I haven’t flown in over two years and will try FPV flying and autos soon. This weekend, I should have my old Goblin gasser up flying again with FPV gear. Coming from a full-size helicopter background and having done a few auto’s! I would like to have the throttle on a twist knob instead of collective stick. Would still have throttle hold on a separate switch for auto practice. Do you think this would be fine with your new Gov code?

Your controller rebooting is a real worry. It’s alright if you have a multi-rotor worth $1-2000 bucks but our gas helicopter are too expensive for that nonsense. It’s surprising it rebooted fast enough to give you control to pull off a low-level auto.

I agree, lunar lander legs on helicopters don’t make sense. You need to be able to run it on, pulling off a 0-0 auto every time takes a lot a skill!

Right now the throttle is on the collective with the throttle curve as conventional RC setups are. The throttle hold switch turns it on or off as per conventional RC setup. The governor depends on that. Instead of a switch could put the throttle hold on a knob, but it wouldn’t be like a full size twist grip because the throttle is either on or off on channel 8.

The governor is now merged in master. If you want to fly it on 3.6 you can get it here->

I flew a new Bell 505 about a month ago and they eliminated the throttle twist grip in the 505. The Turbomeca (Safran) engine has a new dual-channel FADEC and they have a two-position switch for idle and flight power. It’s strange if you’re used to a 206. Amazingly, with that new dual-channel FADEC the engine can be started at either idle or flight throttle. And it can be shut down hot and immediately restart it without danger of over-temping it. It was different, that’s for sure. But it’s kinda like RC ones.

This older hardware evidently has something that doesn’t play nice with ChibiOS. I have three other helicopters with CUAV V3x controllers and those have no problems at all. But this one has been problematic with logging. Sometimes had to reboot it a couple or three times to get rid of the Bad Logging. Then take off and 4 or 5 minutes into the flight it suddenly triggers Bad Logging with a CRITICAL: no IO thread heartbeat message. I tried different SD cards in it and thought I had it fixed. But when there’s stuff like that that suddenly fails in flight I should’ve realized other things can probably go wrong too. I flew it enough on the NuttX build to be confident that it’s happy. And the NuttX build for PX4-V3 (will run fine on a Pixhawk Cube) is now available for the ArduHeli build with the governor.

I can manage very few autos without getting some run-on with these heavy helicopters. Only maybe if I got a 10-12 kt wind or something. The ground usually arrives before I get it stopped. If I strip the helicopter down, get rid of the cargo hook bar, belly tank, payload etc then it floats pretty good and don’t want to come home. But its generally safer to just run it on and don’t risk banging the tail rotor in the dirt.

When I replaced the front strut on the one that got bent I shortened it a bit to give the helicopter 3 degrees of rake in a nose-down attitude sitting on the gear. That will allow the rear of the skids to touch down first. Can’t do that with a full-size but with RC you can. This gear slides over rough terrain pretty good and won’t dig in and nose the heli over. Plus gives it 8 1/2" of tail rotor clearance, even with the 12" diameter tail rotor on it. I got three of these, and I’m going to make the same change to the other two.

It was the gear that saved this one from my bad landing. If the gear can’t crush and absorb energy in a hard landing the helicopter will bounce and tip over. The gear stance is 15" and that helps on rough terrain too. In a hard landing the gear will spread and fold back to keep the helicopter upright. Aluminum is easily repairable and has the ability to deform when it’s load limit is reached without springing back and causing it to tip over. I was quite pleased with the performance of the landing gear - it did what I designed it to without damaging the helicopter.

100_0108

Chris, thanks for the throttle/ Gov info. I watched your throttle curve video and now understand why my idea of twist knob throttle isn’t a good idea with standard RC heli setups and new governor.

I’ve installed ArduHeli-3.6-L1Nav-CubeBlack yesterday and did a few ground run’s without main rotor blades before last light. The old girl started up fine, but I have a few small issues to sort out! Mainly to do with Gov RPM sensor/ noise on the main gear and the engine RPM telemetry/ generator system. I tried an old GV1 sensor for the gov pickup but will change it out for a hall effect sensor.

You have defiantly got the auto’s down pat. Good idea to raise the tail to. I will need to increase my ground and tail clearance at some stage as I’d be lucky to have 50mm on each!

Steve, if you have a small ferrite ring try putting it on the rpm sensor wire near the controller. Wrap the signal and ground wire thru the ring 5 times (if you can). Doing so, in effect, forms a choke coil that sometimes removes most of the outliers on the signal that can be caused by common mode.

Chris, I tried a a small ferrite ring and it did drop the spikes but not enough. Will try a hall effect sensor today instead off the GV-1.

Update:
Change to hall effect sensor worked. :+1:

[quote=“ChrisOlson, post:6, topic:43615”]
But bringing in a 25+ lb UAV requires a lot of airspeed and all moon lander feet is going to do in the run-on it tip it over and wad it up. Doesn’t make sense
[/quote] I agree, but what’s on the flight manual of these helos regarding emergency landings? or do the manufacturer provide adequate training for these scenArios? I have seen some advert videos of commercial UAV doing automatic autorotation , at the flying field , perfectly aligned with the runway and at the exact entry altitude at the moment of cutting the throttle. They even put wheels on the skids to make it smoother. What’s the point of it as in most/more practical commercial cases you are away from the perfectly smooth runway, probably operating close to the danger zone of H/V graph without a clear idea of possible obstacles ?! This automatic stuff would probably be the first thing I disabled If I was going to buy one. Awareness, practice and experience is the only gamechanger in real emergencies I guess.

Steve, wow that GV-1 sensor has really dirty output.

I like the autopilot to fly waypoints as it can do it way more accurate than I can at the distances away from me that it does it at. But otherwise, most of the automatic stuff I don’t trust. Auto takeoff and landing - don’t trust either one. All it takes is a GPS glitch to make that go bad. I have used Return to Launch a couple times to test it to see if it works. Otherwise my Return to Launch is Acro and FPV. LOL. I never use Loiter. I only use Pos Hold for 30 seconds or so before starting a mission to make sure the nav system appears to work and it holds position in the sky before switching to Auto.

I flew an Auto flight late this afternoon and the GPS was screwed up. The altitude was way off. The heli was about a 1/2 mile away and heading for this knob and I could see on the FPV it was low on altitude. And it wasn’t climbing - it was going to do ACFID (Autopilot Controlled Flight Into Dirt). So I went to Return To Launch - switch to acro, pull pitch and get out there before it hits the dirt and fly it home. This mission wasn’t working. It was supposed to be at 40 ft AGL but it was flying at ~25 ft AGL for most of it until I aborted it. So can’t even trust using the Absolute Altitude in missions because it uses the GPS altitude for that and it’s not accurate.

All automatic features require PCB (Pilot Controlled Bailout) when they fail to work.

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Ah, that’s nothing! This is what it was like raw first go without a ferrite ring.

And with Hall effect sensor. The engine is running pretty rich and without main blades. I’m happy to start test flying now.

That is really bad signal from that GV-1 sensor. I have an old GV-1 here someplace. I used to use it on my 700 nitro but it quit working years ago. It was likely the sensor that went bad. On my gassers I am using two magnets on the auto gear that drives the tail rotor transmission, and set the rpm scaling to 0.5. Getting more samples with two magnets instead of one makes the rpm more accurate. The rpm library has a mode filter that filters out outliers and going to two magnets pretty much eliminates the occasional spike at the rpm’s we are measuring with helicopter headspeed.

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Thanks Chris, I’ll try with one magnet for the time being as it’s going to be a bugger changing over to two.

I’ll post a summary of what tridge and I think happened that caused my emergency autorotation.

So, analyzing the tlog is very useful and those tlogs contain WAY more information on things than I ever thought they did, once you learn how to decipher the MavLink messages. The information contained in the tlog, based on remnoise and remrssi vs data received from the FMU, and the timing, indicate the controller powered down in flight momentarily. Which caused the IOMCU to close the throttle to fuel cutoff and put all my servos at trim value. Making an almost perfect entry to autorotation, as this part of the system is powered from the servo rail.

So we found a couple problems. The POWER FLAG messages indicate that my backup power to the controller wasn’t working. This is a bitmask that is set based on the system sensing where it has power available. Primary power to the controller is from the power brick, secondary is on the USB port with a little “smart” NiCAD battery pack. The power flag was 1, it should’ve been 5 if there was actually power on the USB port.

So on a bench test with the system powered from the backup battery the power flag is 4, like it should be. This is what I use for pre-flight to power the system up, warm up the IMU’s etc, without powering the servos, to save on flight systems power until the engine is started and the generator starts charging the flight battery. When I flip the master switch and turn on main systems power, the power flag goes to 1 instead of 5. The reason is because the backup “smart battery” senses no load, so it shuts down its output after a period of time. And it will not repower the system without being physically unplugged and plugged in again. It was my fault for not testing this thoroughly enough, as I did not realize that little battery will not put out power after it has shut down by its “smart” circuit.

So there was no backup power to the controller.

The power brick that comes with the CUAV v3 controller says it accepts 2S to 8S input. But these do NOT work on 2S power. It requires minimum 3S to get power out of the voltage regulator to the controller. So I have a Hex Power Brick Mini on it instead, as this one as has always worked on 2S. However, it may not work reliably on 2S. If the flight systems power sags due to servo or payload load on the system, with that power brick operating on the lower end of the voltage regulator’s range, it will cut the power to the controller momentarily.

I just verified this on a bench test. I powered the system up with the voltage at 7.8V. I let the system run long enough to get the battery to sag to 7.5V. With a probe on my DVOM to measure the voltage I armed it and operated all the servos with the RC. The voltage to the controller dropped to 3.91V.

So my conclusion is that in my piston helicopters running a 2S flight systems voltage that I should be using a different style of BEC that is suited to 2S input to power the electronics. Only use the power brick to monitor the system voltage to ensure the generator is working. And, of course, change my backup battery to a “non-smart” one that continuously powers the backup port.

Thought I’d pass along what we learned, as this could happen to other people running HV servos on straight 2S power, and powering their system with the power brick that comes with the controller on the 2S battery. The generator normally maintains 7.85V system voltage. But in this case the tlog indicates the servo rail was down to around 7.7V due to the battery being a bit low from bench running it in the shop prior to the flight. It takes the generator an hour to charge up the battery to normal voltage if it’s low, along with powering the rest of the system load. And I think that sagged voltage was just enough to cause the power brick to momentarily shut 'er down in flight, as it had hit the bottom of what the voltage regulator could do to power the flight system. So she browned out and put my helicopter into autorotation.

I could “patch” this by setting the minimum arming voltage to 7.8V instead of 7.7. But that would not fix the root cause of the problem, especially if the generator failed in flight and I had to bring it home just on what’s left in the battery. There is ~5A load on the system with electronics, servos, radios, high-powered FPV transmitter, payload. If the generator fails it doesn’t take but a few minutes for the flight systems power to sag below 7.5V with everything operating.

This was the same issue I saw on mine, with the CUAV powermodule on the 766.
This has gone away now that I’m using the mRo powermodule instead. Mine was severe.Any moderate movement of the collective had the FC rebooting.

I’m considering looking into a different generator so that I can run 3S instead. I’m using a separate BEC to regulate the servo rail anyways.

I can confirm I’ve seen this behavior too while doing my initial test hops. Luckily I was low to the ground so there was no damage. Swapped to a 5S pack and haven’t had any power issues since :slight_smile:

The CUAV power module that comes with the V3x would put out 5.15V with no load on it, connected to 2S battery at 7.85V. But as soon as I connected it to the controller the voltage dropped so low it would no power the controller and radios at all. So it was unusable.

The Hex Power Brick Mini has worked fine for a year. But all it took was this one time with the battery voltage a little low at takeoff, and it was enough to make that one collapse too.

I had a couple of these in a box of parts. I set it to 5.25v with the CastleLink programmer and it works great. It puts out 5.2v even with a 2S battery connected with a bad cell that only has 6.8V in it. Way better voltage regulator in it than the power bricks got.

https://www.amainhobbies.com/castle-creations-10-amp-adjustable-bec-cse010-0004-00/p18210

One of the reasons I only use the Mauch power devices…

Last week in Shenzhen I saw a very interesting power module from CUAV that uses CanBus, but don’t have a full set of specs yet.

I had 2 Mauch’s fail on me, so they’re not exactly infallible :smiley:

I initially had trouble even finding the CUAV power module specs, until I found it on banggood:

Needs 3 cell and up! Even 3 cell may be pushing it since it needs 10v or more.

Yeah, I think that’s the ver 1.3 one. Those don’t work on gas helicopters with low voltage 2S system at all. One workaround is to go to 4S and use a Castle 20A BEC pro to power the servo rail. But can’t find any generators for 4S and I HATE messing with batteries. I got electric helicopters and a big TriCopter - never fly 'em because of batteries. I did the big electric experiment with helicopters a couple years ago and gave up on that. The weight you have to carry in batteries to get it to fly for 30 minutes can fly a gasser for 3 hours.

Electric: fly it for 30 minutes, change battery to fly it another 30 minutes spend 6 hours messing with batteries to get another 30 minutes. Investment in batteries - $1,000+

Gas: fly it for 3 hours, spend 5 minutes refueling it, fly it another three hours. Total investment in gas $2.64.

https://store.mrobotics.io/product-p/mro-acsp7v10-mr.htm

This is the one I use on my gasser. (I use Mauch on my electric, but Mauch becomes unneccesary complicated and expensive for the Gasser).