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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 install and configure Betaflight
Latest Betaflight 3.0 is a new quality for flight controller software. It brings many new, cool, features comparing to previous versions. If you fly mini-quad or micro-quad, you have to check what Betaflight 3 has to offer. This tutorial will show how to install Betaflight 3 and how to configure it so mini-quad can go…
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Micro MinimOSD stops overlaying in flight: solution
Both MinimOSD and Micro MinimOSD suffers from irritating technical problem. In some setups, they stops overlaying data during hard maneuvers or even right after arming. Problem is very simple: chip MAX7456 is extremely sensitive in terms of supply voltage quality. Working motors and/or servos, can introduce enough power supply noise to occasionally force MAX7456 to…
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Preview: cheap APM Power Module for Cleanflight
Recently I’ve got my hands on a pair of cheap APM Power Modules from eBay with integrated 5V BEC and current meter (90A max). Although they are APM designed and will not work stright away with STM32 flight controllers like Naze/CC3D/SPRacingF3 (or rather would work only once since they are 5V scaled and those flight…
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How to measure gyro noise frequency with Blackbox
Cleanflight / Betaflight / INAV lowpass filter tuning can be a hard thing to do if you have not idea what is noise frequency you want to cancel. Sure, you can blind test or read tutorials. But what if I tell you, you can measure it quite precisely using only Blackbox logs? Or measure rotation…
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Air Crash Investigation: gone in 6 seconds
“What goes up, must come down”. I had an opportunity to face this old truth 2 weeks ago, when my 600mm quadcopter felt from 30 meters straight into water. It was supposed to be a simple flight: take off fly few hundred meters away with GPS assist engage Return To Home and land Dozens of…
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PWM, OneShot125, OneShot42, Multishot and DSHOT comparison
Two years ago it was simple: you wanted to connect ESC to Flight Controller or radio receiver, you were just doing it. There were only one (maybe 2) protocols that allowed to pass information to ESC. It was a standard PWM protocol. And it was enough. No, with faster hardware, mini or even micro quads,…
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BLHeli firmware for ZTW Spider 40A OPTO Small ESC
ZTW Spider 40A OPTO Small ESC with stock SimonK firmware can be easily flashed with BLHeli using Cleanflight interface. I just did it, the whole process took few minutes. To be true, it took me more time to find out which firmware should those ESC be flashed with, than to flash them. For unknown reason…
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EMAX SimonK Series 30A ESC – 3 months later
When 3 month ago I was doing “Hands on” review for EMAX SimonK Series 30A ESC I was quite optimistic about them. Well, why should I not be? Quite cheap, decent quality, easy to configure. Did EMAX 30A SimonK Series ESC met expectations I was putting on them? Simple and short answer is: no, they…