Thank you! I think it saves a lot of work if you do not have to sort out all the pictures you did not want to make.
Gentles seems to be another Brexit victim… . We will see whether it is still possible to order there from Germany when I will build my Ricohpter. Its a shame.
UC4H: Son of FrankenSolo Maiden
I got a chance to maiden the Son of FrankenSolo in between rain storms this afternoon. Yes OlliW I removed the gimbal 
All I can say is WOW. It was so smooth with no tuning at all. Very precise control. No jumping around. Unfortunately I had a “Bad Loggin” problem which looks like an on-going problem with Arducopter. I turned down the logging and the log buffer on the IO heartbeat and BAD logging errors are gone. But I will have to do my basic test again to get logs to check the vibs and battery usage trends. I can’t wait to take it up with the gimbal.
very cool, congrats!!
I’m glad you find it to fly so well. Let’s hope you get the log done … and be ale to convince yourself of all the goodies you’ll find in there thanks to UC4H and betacopter 
one “complain” however: the OreoLEDs are hardly seen
you could have made them big LED-strips too and replace your others (it currently supports 10 LEDs per strip, it would be easy to adapt to more however)
just joking
I guess with a UC4H Cube IMX6 carrier the build would be even slimmer, cleaner and simpler
… the race would then be open who does the “Ultimate 3DR brain transplant” first …
I could not see the Oreo Led’s if there were ten! That is why I need those Flyron strips and even those when it gets up high can’t be seen. I was disappointed that the logs did not work because I did want to see all the detailed info on battery drain that UC4H offers etc.
The UC4H Cube carrier would be my ultimate build. I would never make another aircraft that I have to take to whole thing apart to get at something like I will now have to do to work on the sd card/logging problem. The UC4H CUbe carrier is small enough to put a “hatch” in the top plate to access the interior without taking the top plate off, thereby releasing all the arms etc. A real pain. The other real advantage is that the USB cable and the HDMI cable can not be installed at the same time on the Solo motherboard because they block each other.
But if my gimbal works that will be satisfiying given I have been working on building a good gimbal for many years/
I could not see the Oreo Led’s if there were ten!
well, they might not be as bright as the Flytron strips, I really can’t tell, but I’m surprised you find the OreoLEDs that hard to see.
I suspect there must be something wrong. I do have 5 per each arm and use 50% brightness, and you can check yourself in that video how bright/lame they are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2qrssv0e8s (start at 6:30).
You power them from 5V, not 3.3V, right? Are yours WS2812b or WS2812 (without the b)? (according to the data sheet they have somewhat different timing, maybe a reason)
EDIT: I just googled Flytron strips, and found this: https://flytron.com/led-light-systems/300-strobon-neo-4-stripes-pack.html. If that is what you use, the OreoLEDs should be as bright as them, since these also use the WS2812B, and 10 of them per strip!
That is, you could connect these strips to the KISS escs instead of your single LED, and they all should light brightly …
… this makes me think even more that something is wrong with your present OreoLEDs
I don’t think there is anything wrong. The single units are quite visible, even in daylight. But I am slightly color blind so I never use colored lights as indicators because I can’t easily tell the difference in the colors. That is why I like the Notify Display so much because it tells me in text what the status is rather than blinking lights.
The Neo are there to help me tell orientation which I have a really hard time with. My eyes also don’t work in “stereo” that is why I can’t solder the little tiny encoder wires because even at 10x I can’t tell when the wire is right next to the pad or above it.
I’m still a bit puzzled what the story is.
In the video the Neo/Flytron LEDs come across sooo much brighter than the OreoLEDs, that I understand that one would not prefer them.
However, as much as I can infer from that Flytron web page, the Neo/Flytron LEDs are also just WS2812B, i.e., exactly those which are supposed to be also used for the OreoLEDs. Thus, there is no reason why the OreoLEDs should be sooo much dimmer than your Neo/Flytron LEDs. Both should be equally bright.
It is even better than that. The UC4H KISS Esc carriers came with servo wires for connecting the OreoLEDs, didn’t they? From the picture on the Flytron webpage I infer that the Neo/Flytron LEDs also have servo plugs. So, you should NOT have to do ANY soldering to connect them to the KISS ESC carriers. From the web page I infer that they even have the correct pin sequence. Hardly can be simpler, I would argue. Especially no soldering needed.
From your video the Neo/Flytron appear to be green and red with some sweeping white lights. The OreoLEDs are also red, green, and white. I’m thus not sure I understand the color argument.
Sure, the OreoLEDs are there for indication, but not only for this! Once in air, they are also there to tell the orientation … as the Neo/Flytron do !!
So, I conclude: The OreoLEDs should be as bright as the Neo/Flytron are, they use the same colors, and they tell orientation as much as the Neo/Flytron do.
That’s what I observe by comparing. And that’s all what I’m saying
I don’t know what the brightness level on the Oreo lights is set at. IT might be low power when I was testing on the bench. It is the sweeping white light that is important with the NEO strip. I even wrote Flytron and asked them to add a mode where the background lights are off to save power. The sweeping white light “points” forward. Which the Oreo lights can’t do.
In my case I can’t swap them even to play. The connector for the Flytron is in the center of the frame and the connector for the Oreo is at the end of the arms.
I got a chance to maiden the Son of FrankenSolo in between rain storms this afternoon. Yes OlliW I removed the gimbal 
All I can say is WOW. It was so smooth with no tuning at all. Very precise control. No jumping around. Unfortunately I had a “Bad Logging” problem which looks like an on-going problem with Arducopter. I turned down the logging and the log buffer and the IO heartbeat and BAD logging errors are gone. But I will have to do my basic test again to get logs to check the vibs and battery usage trends. I can’t wait to take it up with the gimbal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpyh84oJLhk
I finally got the logging issue taken care of for SOFS. IN the latest versions of Copter firmware there is a new Log_Backend parameter. Because the Solo has a co-computer it can, and defaults to, copying the logs to both the flight controller and the co-computer which does not appear to work right. So I changed the parameter to 1 which uses only the flight controller as normal.
Vibrations
I was really pleased with the vibration charts but it is not surprising given how well the quad flew in it’s maiden flight. In the old graph of vibrations acceptable is -3 to +3 for the X and Y axis and -5 to -15 for the Z axis. SOFS is recording values for X and Y of less than .3 to .5 and Z axis vibes just as low. I included the barometer graph right below to show it really was flying during the vibration plot.
I was concerned, and still am, about the battery. It is a 10.5amp Titan LI-ION battery. It has much higher energy density than a equivalent LI-PO but it is limited in it’s discharge rate. Think real low C, like 3C. But the battery power graph looks good. It shows about 360w and around 16amps. But this is without the load of the gimbal. So I will have to see how it does on the first gimbal flight.
So far so good. Now to test the quad with full gimbal load.
I am relieved to find that with the gimbal attached the Son of FrankenSolo flies just as well as without the gimbal. I am disappointed to find that the logs once again not available. So I can’t compare the power usage and determine if it is within the “C” limits of the battery. I am pretty confident that it will be fine but I am not going to do a flight time test until I know for sure. I am not willing to let the battery fail half way through the test.
I started out on this journey in 2012. I knew nothing about RC and RCGroups.com was pretty intimidating. I could not believe how many forums about so many different RC vehicles there were. I wanted to do an abstract photography portfolio that I needed an aerial view to do. I got a delta wing kite kit that was and is a very nice plaform but I needed to hover rather than fly to get what I wanted. I gave up until I saw an article about the new DJI Phantom in late 2013. I got excited about it like everyone and his brother. Until I realized it could only carry a gopro. But that was the beginning. I built my first DJ450 afterward. The first flight it shot up about 40ft and came tumbling down out of the trees out of control. It took me a full 4 months to figure out that the pitch in mission planner radio cal moved the opposite of every other stick if setup correctly. I built a dozen more aircraft over the years. I have a drawer full of half finished gimbals.
So this is a significant point for me. Only took me 6 years and a LOT of reading on RCGroups to get here.
Many thanks to the generous members that spend their personal time helping others all over the world to better enjoy this endeavour.
So here is the maiden flight of the Son of FrankenSolo with it’s STorM32NT gimbal attached. I really don’t have any way of evaluating the video. I have never gotten video this good to critique. It is not perfect but at this point I am not sure what is due to the camera or my older computers playing it or gimbal. It really does not matter because it is the best I have ever gotten.
Matthew, OlliW has shared really three different ways to play with UAVCAN. You can make all of his UAVCAN UC4H adapters with simple “Blue Pill” STM boards. Jdrones has produced finished General nodes which can be used for all of his different UAVCAN pheripherals. Lastly he has custom boards, that do the same things, like the ESC Kiss carriers or Rangefinder boards that just make a cleaner more finished look but run the same firmware
The AUW is heavier than I wanted at 4000grams. The landing gear is part of that extra but I really like them. In typical fashion they turned out to be a thin carbon layer on the outside and fiberglass on the inside. The gimbal turned out heavier too at 500g because I started with carbon fiber gimbal and found I could not balance the Ricoh on the platform the way ti was designed. I really wanted to use the Ricoh because it is only 250g which is considerably lighter than a similar Nex.
It is always a battle to get your weight under control and still have the features and the flight time. Every gram counts.