Quads are still the order of the day, and I am enjoying them. The ADS 400Q is finished and flying, and man is it fun! On 4 cells, with 1250KV motors, it is a real beast. I am impressed with the acceleration and speed, though in all honesty its gonna take me a while to get used to that while I am under the hood. Flying this thing FPV is pretty cool, the clean plate/dirty plate design makes for some great video. I am going to look at different lenses for the FPV camera, though, since the 2.5mm seems way to wide for this thing. I am thinking maybe a 2.8 or a 3.6, to narrow the field of view a bit, which will bring back my depth perception. With wide angle lenses, things appear farther away than they actually are. In a plane, this isn't a problem, but for me and a quad, it might result in an encounter with tree branches. Thankfully, the noise I heard was allot worse than any actual damage. While it sounded like I had cut the tree down, in reality, I had only hit a small branch with the left front prop..and didn't even nick the prop!
I have found yet another project, too. The guys over at Flitetest had posted this cool FPV ground station:
The Flitetest post can be found here:
http://flitetest.com/articles/fpv-full-scale-cockpit-ground-station-w-42-tvThe full build thread can be found here:
http://fpvlab.com/forums/showthread.php?16769-Full-Cockpit-Ground-Station-construction-blog
Several YouTube videos about the cockpit can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/brettsgalaxyvids/videos
That is the most immersive thing I have seen for FPV so far. While I don't know that I will go quite that far, I do want to duplicate the control setup. I have already worked out how to use an Arduino to generate the PPM stream needed by today's R/C transmitters, which means I will be able to simply plug in my "full scale" controls to the trainer port of the R/C radios I use to fly my models. The advantage is that no mods to my radios are required, and other folks can try out the full scale controls with their models.
So far, the code works, but I have not acquired/built the full scale controls. Heck...I just found out about this ground station on the 14th of November, and it's only the 17th. It's gonna take some scrounging to get the controls together, so it will be a while till I get this done..plus I really need to clean up the shop. It's really bad. To many projects, and not enough time spent putting things away. I really need to do another purge, and dispose of allot of stuff. Every so often I have to do this, I have noticed I collect stuff, strip down the usable parts, but I never throw away the useless parts..which results in "stuff creep." That's kinda like feature creep, but allot more messy.
