Hi Id like to say, I can finally say I had my first successful maiden flights today!! I built a 550 Carbon Bumblebee quad this summer and originally put a kk2.1 in it, which i ditched in a day… I bought a pixhawk (full kit) with 3dr 900 mgz telemetry(mavlink), minumosd,M8N gps, ppm encoder,3dr power module. Well, ill trll you, it was a long road till today! First off, i spent a day, just trying to get the pixhawk hooked up to my laptop through mission planner so i could program it. It turns out the usb cable that was supplied was not of good enough quality to work with it! After I finally figured that out, I went through a week of troubleshooting to find out my ESC’s wern’t compatible with the pixhawk, as no matter what i did, I could not get it to put out enough power to get into a hover. So I ordered a new 20A Hobbywing quattro ESC, and installed it, and had to rip the whole quad down, to get it… SO, now I got enough power to get into flight. I spent 3 evenings trying to get into a hover so i could test this thing out, but even with 2 (new) 4s 2200mah packs in parallel, I could only hover for 1 minute before it went into failsafe, as it showed the batterys were drained, but when i landed, the voltage would slowly climb back up! Well, I disabled the failsafe, and did a 5 minute test hover with no issue. I check the voltage left and there is more tham 50%, so I tried a 10 minute hover. And there is still 20% or so left. SO last night, I thought today I would get to do my first real flight. Ill order a new 3dr power module and that should be fixed… And so, last night I charged my little lipo up for my turnigy 9x TX and put it in, and with out my glasses on, accidentally plugged the battery in wrong, releasing the magic smoke from the chips within!!! DOH!!!
Thats where the fun started, I took a Spektrum rec. off one of my heli’s. and bound it to my pixhawk, then used the satellite for a RX, and my DX7 for my radio… The huge headscratcher was trying to get 6 flight modes working with the DX7!!! All the turorial’s I found to do so were either for the newer DX7s, or just plain did not work!!! Finally I started from scratch and figured out how to use my 3 pos flight mode switch and the gear switch to get 6 flight modes working, using some creative mixing! I like my DX7 better than the 9x, but its kinda weak on channels,but for now itll do untill I get a Taranis, or something with 10+ channels…
So, finally today, I was able to fly 2 packs (4 4s packs) worth of flying and man, can I say this thing is stable!!! Im using the stock settings from mission planner too! I didnt tweak anything yet! Its a hell of alot better than the KK2.1, thats for sure! The wind was gusting pretty good, and it held just fine! Im charging the packs now, and plan on testing the Alt Hold, and Pos Hold settings yet! And maybe the RTL… I can barly wait to set up a misiion in mission planner and try Auto mode…
Wow. hats off to 3dr! this pixhawk is awesome… Now i think ill give this quad to my Son and build myself something bigger! It was a heck of a difficult build, with alot of issues along the way, but well worth it!
Ginnz!
