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iNav: Return To Home with land
New release of iNav is at the doors. Today I took testing version for a spin and tried few navigation scenarios. For example, transition for Position Hold to Return To Home with landing. It looked like this: It behaved fantastically: nice accuracy, precise landing. There were few wobbles on descend, but that was caused not…
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Connecting ultrasonic rangefinder (Sonar) to Cleanflight and INAV
Keeping constant altitude with a drone is not a trivial task. Specially, if drone is supposed to keep give altitude very precisely few meters above the ground. One of the reasons for it is difficulty of reading precise altitude. Barometer can drift when atmospheric pressure changes and can produce a lot of noise. GPS is…
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WiFi telemetry for Cleanflight with EZ-GUI and ESP8266
Some time ago I have written a tutorial how to setup Bluetooth based telemetry link between Cleanflight and PC or smartphone. It’s simple and it works. But it has some disadvantages. For example, connection is very very slow and has a limited range: up to 10 meters. While it is enough to change PIDs before…
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New PID controller for iNav
If anybody keeps track of my posts about iNav flight controller software, he or she should notice that I like it very much. Guy nicknamed DigitalEntity did excellent job improving Cleanflight’s navigation modes. Maybe it is still not the same level as Pixhawk or Naza, but with this improvement speed those two are within reach…
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Quick review: DAL 5040 propellers
My last review of cheap Chinese propellers, Gemfan 5×3 3 leaf, was quite negative. This time it will be much, much better: DAL 5040 (5×4″) fiberglass reinforced propellers. They are cheap, only slightly more expensive than super popular Gemfans 5030. But they beat Gemfans in every aspect. Not only DAL 5040 give more power and…
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Antennas: power loss on polarization mismatch
Most people in RC hobby knows that receiver and transmitter antennas should match polarization. But what would happen if there was a mismatch? For example when transmitter uses linear vertical and receiver circular left hand? There would be a loss of power, attenuation. How much? Look at table below. Remember: -3dBi means half of power is…
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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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Better GPS for Cleanflight: iNav
Cleanflight is an awesome piece of software for STM32 based flight controllers. But Cleanflight has one very serious flaw that makes its usage on bigger drones at least problematic. Cleanflight sucks in GPS and barometer support. Sucks a lot. It can handle Position Hold (somehow), Return To Home (barely) and Altitude Hold (oh man, up…