fangin.com RC, photos & tech

Tricopter Flight test

I've got a couple of flights under the belt now but there's a persistent problem with the front right motor. It keeps stopping dead. This isn't so bad when its 30cm off the ground but when it's a few meters in the air there's potential for more damage. I caught one crash on the trusty little keychain camera, one mounted on my hat and the other mounted on-board the tri when the motor failed.

I checked all the connections, added padding to the gyros for vibration dampening and re-calibrated the throttle and tried again. Unfortunately the same result with that motor stopping mid-flight. I pulled out the trusty iPhone 4.0 and captured some video to help diagnose the problem over at rcgroups.

I've decided it's probably a dodgy motor or maybe the ESC. The motor is out of stock at HobbyKing so I ordered a virtually identical one from lowpricerc.com. At about six bucks each, I considered ordering three to make sure I have identical motors all round but when trying to order them, I got the "out of stock" error here as well! Turns out they had two left so I snapped up both. I'll replace the dodgy motor and keep one spare.

Just in case I grabbed a replacement ESC to help troubleshoot the problem. I went with the Turnigy Plush 18 Amp ESC because I already have the programming card and when I originally bought all the parts, this is the ESC I wanted to use but it was out of stock, surprise surprise.

So now I wait for my replacement motor until I try again. In the meantime I'll go learn some Arduino programming so I can get rid of the 4 HK401B gyros and use the Wii sensors instead. Apparently the Arduino controlled TriWiiCopter is more stable.