Category: DIY
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Project Dualcopter – worklog #1
Flying season 2016 is slowly coming to an end on northern hemisphere. That means less time spent on an airfield and more time spent behind a desk. For this autumn I've found a very interesting, small project: Dualcopter. Dualcopter is an UAV with two coaxial contra-rotating propellers and 2 control surfaces driven by servos. Lift…
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Marabou Stork: FPV airplane maiden flight
For the last few week I’ve been little busy building my next fixed wing UAV: “Marabou Stork” Depron/Carbon/3D Printed airplane with pusher prop build for FPV. It’s improved version of “Red Cruiser” model from last year. It’s equipped with KFm-2 wing, Turnigy D2826-6 2200KV motor, APC-E 7×4″ propeller, 2700mAh Lipo battery, FPV setup with MinimOSD…
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How to cut Depron
Depron is an amazing material. Light, cheap, waterproof, easy to process and quite durable. Almost everything in RC world can be made from Depron. All one needs is imagination, glue and proper knife. Like I mentioned few times before, I’m cheap, so at the beginning of my adventure with Depron, I was choosing cheap modeling…
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Beitian BN-880 GPS 3D Printed Case
Beitian BN-880 (I’ve bought mine from Banggood) is an excellent, cheap and accurate Ublox NEO-M8N GPS module. I’m using it for last few months and I’m very happy with it. But is has one serious flaw: there are no cases/enclosures for it. So, in most applications it is naked. I’ve decided to fix that and…
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HC-12 433MHz RF serial module range test
As I mentioned in my first post about HC-12 433MHz radio modules, I’ve put my interest in them for telemetry purposes. While S.Port telemetry I’m using in FrSky Taranis radio might have higher range than HC-12, it is closed environment. Since $10 for a pair of HC-12 is not much, I’ve decided for more open…
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Improving cheap radio range
Radio range of my first drone, UDI 829A was pretty pathetic. OK, it was (still is, I only have to finally replace motors) pretty indestructible, quite stable and reasonably priced. But effective radio range as quite short. More less 50 meters. Above that limit strange things started to happen. The reason was pretty simple. Just…
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How to flash firmware to ESP-01 ESP8266 WiFi module
One can think that internet know everything about everything. Yesterday I’ve learned the hard way that is does not. It took me better part of evening to find a working way to flash firmware, any firmware, to cheap ESP-01 ESP8266 WiFi modules. There are many tutorials, most of them were just wrong in my case.…
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10 channels for FlySky FS-i6 radios
This news might be not super fresh, but somehow it missed my attention. There is a good news for all owners of FlySky FS-i6 radios: there is an unofficial firmware that turns this cheap 6 channel radio into 10 channel one. Of course, there is a small catch, or even a few of them: All…
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Read RC PWM signal with Arduino
Arduinos are cheap and simple development board. You can do a lot with even the simplest of them. For example build you own quadcopter and flight controller (after all MultiWii = Arduino + MPU6050). Of course, this is not as simple as one might imagine and there are few (actually a lot) obstacles that needs…