HP Modelismo had a sale on fopr DJI Phantom 1 quadcopters - 299. Yes, I know they’re old but they take standard 3S 2200mAh batteries wheras the later models have proprietary battery packs. Whay do I care? Well, the Turnigy packs cost me something like $12 and the DJI packs for the later models cost $150. You choose. I did. DJI made there name by producing a quadcopter with GPS that was perfectly tuned direct from the factory.
The V-Tail was flying great so I opted to add GPS to it so I could have fun things like position-hold, return-to-launch etc. I went to another flying site about 30 minutes away to test because it has wide-open space. Testing was going fine for a while and then when testing altitude-hold (where the quadcopter remains at the set height no matter what you do or where you fly) things got a little… odd.
One of the noticeable things comparing my tricopter to other quadcopters is the speed of yaw. Quadcopters, because they rely on the torque effect of a pair of motors going faster than the opposite pair tend to be quite lazy in yaw. My tricopter, on the other hand, is not lazy. In fact, it’s pretty damn fast rotating. So, I build a V-Tail quadcopter, which in theory should be somewhere in yaw speed between a quadcopter and tricopter.
My first time tuning the PIDs in a flight controller. It seems like a fairly simple task but can be rather repetitive. Tweak, fly a little, tweak, rinse, repeat. At least the KK2 board is really easy to fiddle with. It has an integral LCD display and buttons, so you can tweak in the field without needing to plug it into a computer.
