Newby considering ardupilot

I am an experience rc pilot mainly focused on helicopters. My working models utilise Skookum and DJI H which I consider to be outdated. My working models are 700 sized flybarless and I have been told that the control board needs to be central ie under the CofG.
My questions are - 1 could I utilise arducopter leaving just setup procedures and 2 - positioning of the unit.
Thanking you
Charlie

I re-tagged this to trad-heli.
The guys who can give you the best advice may not read rover posts :wink:

Welcome,

Traditional Helicopters have been gaining more and more support within ArduPilot so you came in at the right time.

I would urge you to check the excellent tutorials that @ChrisOlson has published here http://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/traditional-helicopter-configuration.html

and also follow our progress on bringing a new 700 class heli (a ThunderTiger E700) to the newest firmware available (3.6RC), which has already given some great results. Here Thunder Tiger E700 and here ThunderTiger E700 v2 - Going electric

About positioning the Flight controller is not critical, as long you are careful with vibration isolation, or use a Flight Controller that provides some isolation internally.

Hi!
The last time I flew a heli was my father’s nitro engine-powered Hirobo Shuttle Plus about six years ago, no flight controllers, only a tail gyro. I don’t have any experience with ArduCopter trad-heli, but I have setup multiple quadcopters, a couple of hexacopters and one octocopter and in my experience, at least for mulitrotors, vibration isolation of your flight controller usually translates to hassle-free operation.

  1. In your first question, could you please clarify what you mean by “leaving just setup procedures”?
    You could definitely utilise ardupilot for what you are trying to achieve and more. The documetation is great and you will get all the help you need on these forums. As long as you spend a little bit of time going through the documentation and setting up ArduPilot, you will save yourself a lot of headache later on.

  2. Just as @LuisVale said:

About positioning the Flight controller is not critical, as long you are careful with vibration isolation, or use a Flight Controller that provides some isolation internally.

I have tried this myself on multirotors and fixed wings so I would believe the controller is more than capable of handling a situation where it is not directly at the CoG.

  1. In addition to what @LuisVale said about vibration isolation, I would like to add a couple of things:

I have had no problems using this style of mounts:

For rotorcraft, I have seen the most effective method for reducing vibrations is to balance your motors and propellers on a multirotor. For a helicopter, I am guessing that would probably translate to balancing the blades and adjusting the blade tracking (correct me if I am wrong here).

The documentation for Vibration Damping:
http://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-vibration-damping.html#common-vibration-damping

Lastly coming to the fligh controllers that provide internal damping to the IMU, The new Pixhawk 2.1 has it, and I have been using the CUAV Pixhack v3 with great success on multirotors and fixed wings.

Hope this helps, even with my limited knowledge of helicopters.

Much appreciated. My reference to set up procedures relate to locating the unit plugging in the servos and then following setup on the PC