Thank you for making me a member of this forum. I am an electric bike builder and longtime member of www.endless-sphere.com/forums which is another free forum discussing light electric vehicle transportation. In 2005 began my search for energy independence and by 2008 had given up fossil fuels all together. I now live completely off the grid. My life has been forever changed by this move and I couldn’t have done it without the Sphere. Somewhere Plato is smiling.
I have wanted to own a drone since I was a little kid. I would imagine the Millenium Falcon or that ship the hawk man had from Buck Rogers gliding along next to our car on vacations. Me and my father assembled a gas powered plane, painstakingly assembled from balsa and tissue only to disappear out of range almost immediately or burst into flames. But I still, as an adult would look out the window on long rides and imagine a little tiny Han Solo following my truck.
Now as an adult I can justify spending the money for what I need. So here is what I need; a drone that can fold up, go into the trailer of my electric two wheeled drive off road bike (of which I am a proud designer), launch on the trail (backwoods) and rise above the trees to give me a birds eye view of which way to go. Why? I do the scouting for large scale camping expeditions. You can look at all the maps in the world but nothing beats putting your eyes on a chosen spot. With a drone I could confirm water sources and clearings without having to drive there and find out its flooded or such things. So that's what I need.
What do I have? Well, l I started out with those tiny cheap copters to get a feel, then I bought the UDI 818a and learned the fly a quad in my drafty but large tobacco barn. I have 10 count 5000 mAh 7s Zippy compacts that I run in series for 14s 25 Ah to run my bikes ( have some other lipo laying around too. I have the iCharger 208b with Meanwell power supply for bulk charging. A solar bike trailer to charge everything in the field. I purchased a lot of my stuff but not all from Hobby King. I have the Predator 650 folding quad, Multistar Elite HV motors, Afro HV 20 amp esc. HKpilot 2.7 master set and am still waiting to purchase a good radio.
So now to the stumbling block. I have waited patiently for the parts so I could work on this in the dead of winter, in the mean time I have watched all the tutorials I can find. I hooked everything up, even had the video playing in the background, I was going through the calibrations when the minimOSD got hot (pretty sure) and everything shut down. I unhooked it all and tried to run just the board again to see what happened. All the lights come on in the specified times but it won't upload firmware, I get the "no Connection; connection error"
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I hope I posted in the right place. Maybe my first mistake was not joining this forum earlier. Thank you in advance for any help or advice you can give. Knowledge is our final freedom…