Sunday, August 18, 2013

Arms Too Short to Box with God*

Controller yaw authority still isn't as good as it could be, so in the course of my experimentation I decided to try out shorter arms (less rotational inertia). Here's a view of the whole contraption sitting on the table. I moved the landing gear inward and attached pool noodle for padding. Nice, but this arrangement was very tippy on landing if there was any lateral motion at all. I didn't want to take the time to add little legs to the ends of the arms, so I inserted some square carbon fiber tubes that I had laying around into the pool noodle. Worked like a charm. Adds weight, but I'll worry about that after I've truly solved the heading hold issue:


























Here's a closeup of the little spirit levels I've been using to verify that the prop shafts are aligned with the IMU on top. They tend to get out of alignment whenever the craft takes a good thump during testing:

















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