Hubsan X4 FPV

I got some small parts to put together a small 5.8 ghz video system to play around with. I attached it to my hubsan x4 like you see below.

I needed to solder on a JST plug to steal power from the main battery for the whole system. Other than that, it's all just rubber banded on.

The fit is REALLY tight. The props hit the camera wires or the antenna if they move slightly off so every crash requires a reset of all of the parts. I should look into transplanting all of the electronics to another frame.

UPDATE (2016-01-22):
I have changed the setup slightly... I now used double sided tape to attach the camera on top and the transmitter on bottom, The wires are wrapped around the body/arms.

None of the wires stick into the props... there is JUST BARELY enough space between the front props and the camera. I am experimenting with where to put the camera to give it a good angle to fly. This thing doesn't have acro mode so the "typical" up angle makes it always look at the sky. It needs to be a little further back than this pic has it. When I go full forward, I am just looking at the ground.

Here's a video of it flying... I dont have a way to capture the view from the onboard camera... yet...

Baby Baron Build

I was bored one evening and had some extra foam board so I decided to try to make a mini RC plane. The Tiny Trainer I have has about a 3 foot wingspan so I aimed for something around 1 foot. I found plans for the Baby Baron. It only uses about 1 board of foam and it uses the same motor pod as the Tiny Trainer. I will need some extra 5g servos though. I did a quick search and then ordered some HXT500s which I think will do it.

All the parts cut out and ready to be assembled.

The sub components together.

Finished airframe.

All together it took about 2-3 hours to cut the plans, cut the parts, and then glue them together. This was my first scratch build. The precision of some of the cut outs is not perfect and the wing seems like it's slightly out of square. The left wing is about 1 degree forward of even. I am sure it will fly well enough.

In order to actually install the electronics, I needed to build new control horns and a firewall. I made them from an old credit card.

They seem to be good enough to move the control surfaces.

Here's a pic of the guts. The receiver is in the back. The esc and the battery are velcro'd to the sides but as close to the centerline as possible.

It seems to balance all right but only a test flight will confirm. The motor is a multistar elite 2204. It's reverse threaded though (I bought CCW as I thought that was normal, but apparently not) so I need some reverse threaded nylock nuts to keep the props on.

FT Tiny Trainer landing gear

I bashed up the powered nose of my Tiny Trainer pretty good so I needed to replace it.

On the flitetest website, you can download plans to build their models. I went to the tiny trainer page and printed out the panels that have the powered nose and doublers.

Apparently when I printed it, I did so at like 103% or something by accident because the longer measurements were off by a bit. The shorter dimensions were close enough to be fine. I had to make the holes for the skewers in slightly different places to make it all work.

A bonus side effect of this mistake was that the nose was about a half cm taller than the old one.

Notice the gap at the bottom with a little foam piece in the middle

What I decided to do was to use this gap to run a piece of wire hangar through to put wheels on. The hangar goes in from the front and then behind that little foam piece in the middle. The back part of the fuselage comes forward to that piece and retains the wire.

I made some wheels by tracing out D cell batteries and stacking 3 of them to make it thick enough. I drilled a hole in the middle (or close to it) to run the wire through and then bent it up. Since this pic, I added some hot glue balls to the corner between the axles and the upright to keep the wheel from migrating around that bend.

Here it is taxiing across my basement floor. Seems to work well enough.

Standalone mwosd on minimosd with FTDI USB interface

I have a minimosd (without the kvmod) that I wanted to play with and perhaps run on my fixed wing once I get confident enough to try some FPV. I decided first to try to get it running in standalone mode. This is how the minimosd works without a connection to a flight controller such as the naze32. In this mode, you can only get battery voltage overlay.

First thing is to bridge the 5v partitions. There are 2 pads (one front, one back) that you need to make sure there's a solder connection on.

Then plug the FTDI adapter into the minimosd according to the pinout. As you can see here, they just go straight through on this board.

Make sure you have the Arduino suite downloaded as well as MWOSD.

Then plug the adapter in to your USB port. It will add some drivers. Load up the arduino studio and open the MW_OSD.ino sketch from the MWOSD package you downloaded. In order to work in standalone mode you need to make a few changes in Config.h.

1) #define MINIMOSD

This is the OSD hardware line that should be uncommented.

2) #define NOCONTROLLER

This will get the board to work without a flight controller. If you are using a FC, choose the correct one here.

3) #define FIXEDWING

I am not sure what this does but from the code it looks like it has something to do with a compass/GPS mode.

That's it. Save this and flash it to the board. You'll use Arduino studio and have to select the proper com port and board type. Most likely "Arduino Pro or Pro Mini (5V,16MHz) w/ATmega328"

Now open the MW_OSD_GUI appropriate for your platform and select the correct com port. It should load your MWOSD settings.

First thing is to select and upload fonts (left side). It seems they get corrupted easily. I selected "Display Video Voltage" so that the video power feed is used to display the voltage. This is how you do battery overlay without a FC. If you plugged 5v in from the FC and 12v in from the video input you might burn out the board. There's a stepdown transformer between the 12v side and 5v side but it might blow up if it's fed in both directions. 

You need to play with a multimeter to find the right settings for the voltage adjust.

Unless you are using an FC, none of the "Displays" or "HUD" stuff will work. It needs the gyro and mode inputs to display anything. I really just forgot to turn them off in this pic.

You should also put your HAM callsign in there to legally transmit (I, like most people, am using 5.8 GHz for the video link). Make sure to save your settings.

Now plug it in between your camera and your video Tx. The image you receive on the receiver side should have the OSD overlay.

NOTE: The OSD telemetry and the USB by default both use UART1. If you want to be able to use cleanflight while the OSD is plugged in, you need to switch to UART2 and use the RC3/4 pins and have your receiver->FC in PPM mode.

NOTE 2: Also, powering the board using the bridge from the 12v side is not how it is intended to be used. You are meant to power from the 5v side with the bridge and then have the 12v power not plugged in to that side of the board. That said, it does appear to work for me and I haven't burned it out (yet).

Taranis first model setup

When setting up my first model I bound it and then went flying.

After thinking a bit more I realized there are a few settings that I should pay attention to.

1) Throttle cutoff.

On the inputs menu (page 5) Long press enter and then "insert after". I edited the first one and set it to "weight:0 offset:-100 and set the switch to SB up". I set the second one to normal (weight:100 offset:0 and SB down)

So when Taranis powers on, it wants all switches in the up mode. In this setting, the throttle stick does nothing. I can't accidentally turn it on without first touching the switch to set it all the way to the down position.

2) Dual Rates.

Similar to above, I set the aileron (which I actually have plugged into rudder) and elevator to both operate on switch G (SG) so that the default is low rates and the down position is high rates.The process here is the same. Long press enter and "insert after" and then edit the first one setting it for SG up and weight at, say 50. I also set expo which makes the sticks "softer" in the middle and "faster" at the extremes. You can do this or not.

FrSky Taranis initial setup

I bought a frsky taranis x9d as my radio as this seems to be what many of the people on the internet recommend. There are a lot of different radios out there and all of them function just fine but the Taranis has a TON of options to customize the radio. I don't know how to use most of them now but in the future they may prove useful

When you first get the radio, it needs a little bit of configuration. Long press menu from the main screen and you'll see a bunch of options about date and volume and other general settings. Configure these as you like. Here's a nice reference on how this page works.

Basically set the time, the battery range, (I use 7.0-8.5), set volume like you want, and any alerts. There's nothing particularly fancy here. Page 8 of the setup is calibration. You should go through this. It's just a matter of setting the sticks in the middle, clicking enter, and then moving them around like it tells you to.

I pulled the SD card out of my Taranis to back it up and when I put it back into the transmitter, it wasn't playing the sounds. No "welcome to open tx", nothing. I tried to back up models and it just said "SD Card Error". Apparently the file system on the SD card got corrupted somehow. Maybe by not cleanly unmounting it. I reformatted the disk as FAT and then copied the backup stuff back on to the card. When I reinserted it, everything started working fine. So, if you want to back up the card (good idea) make sure you are careful to cleanly unmount the disk before removing it from your computer.

FT Tiny Trainer

I am building a flitetest tiny trainer with my daughter.


Here it is with the glider parts. We built the glider first before the transmitter arrived so we could play.












It's a plain speed build kit with their power pack A electronics.

Here it is with the power nose built and attached.














The build is very easy. There are no paper instructions, instead there is a build video available from flitetest that walks you through the process of constructing the plane. I bought some 1000 mAh batteries which are slightly too large to fit inside the fuselage really, so I strapped it to the top as you can see. It is nice because I can easily move it around to make the CG work.

Unfortunately it is also exposed during crashes so it can get thrown around a bit. The receiver is strapped on the back section because that allows me to move it around a bit also. It can fit inside but it is kind of tight.

Here's a video of my first flight

The first flight itself wasn't awful. Shortly afterwards, I crashed a few times and broke all my props. The ones I had in the kit were all 6x4.5 and I am going to try some other ones like 6x4 or 6x3 to see if that helps. Also, I am looking for some props that are made of a softer plastic so that they don't break so easily. It would be nice if they would bend a bit before just shattering.