Ouch! Similar thing happened with my hexacopter the first time I got it in the air, except mine was mostly due to my ineptitude. It engaged RTH on low battery, as I'd programmed it to, but I didn't realise at the time that the compass wasn't calibrated properly. I totally lost control and it veered away from me before flying straight toward the ground at a fair rate. Snapped the PCB frame and one of the landing gear mounts. That was not a fun day!
Ouch, concrete is definitely bad news. I dropped my new Spark during hand take off onto concrete, one arm LED cap came off and gimbal casing received some mark. Similarly, on another day, I flew too enthusiastically in sport mode and clipped a tree, the Spark dropped further onto grass and nothing broke or any marks. The Spark is only 300g including battery. It handles wind surprisingly well. I can see the next iteration of Spark to come at 249g as this arbitrary weight for registration seems to be adopted in a lot of places. I'm very happy with my Spark bundle, a bit disappointed by the RC range, video feed dropping out after 600m or so without interference. But then, the Spark is so small, it's hard to see beyond 300m. Everything else is great, love flying through tree gaps with this tiny drone.
Parts arrived, so back to repairs. Hammered gimbal back into shape, glued camera cage, now only need to cobble together an end cap for motor. Resoldered the missing caps Now to connectors, after removing modem one, joy of joys, some pads gone missing, some other were lifted, but still in okay-ish state (sorry for bad image quality) Repaired the pads with some fine wire, resolderd connector Now onto gimbal connector, none of the pads were damaged, thats good. What was not okay, was that due to very limited space I had to use very long and narrow iron tip (25mm long, 0,8mm wide at the end conical tip, connector is 0,5mm pitch and there is sub 2mm gap between connector and caps), coupled this with multilayer board with huge power planes and 24 times magnification just to see what I'm doing, results in a nightmare of a soldering job. Had to use hot air just to preheat the area and then try to solder with soldering iron cranked to max. Removing bridges was even a bigger nightmare (even with hot air preheat, had hard time melting solder on ground plane leads), But hey, after 2 hours - success. All of this results: drone connects to controller and transmits video, gimbal works. Next step - testing if it drives motors.
Good job on the repairs! Been playing around with micro soldering and smc stuff recently as well. Currently have a few new builds on the go but no pictures as im not going to upload to photobucket anymore and I need to get them off the phone. Couple of videos for you though.... This is how I race... And I had an early morning to myself so went out on my own and just smashed through 10 packs back to back...
Figured I'd cross-post this here. If anyone's interested I'm having to sell up my S550-based hexacopter over here . I'm asking £450, but unfortunately I cannot ship it - it's just too big and there are too many parts to send it safely. All it needs is some new props and a power supply for the battery charger; pretty much everything is being sold: all flight components, frame, telemetry TX/RX, gimbal, action camera, transmitter, batteries, etc. Really don't want to sell it but I'm going to be left with a hefty insurance excess to pay; in the process of failing to steal my motorbike, some incompetent little tool has damaged the frame and basically written the bike off.
I had to try and sell off my hexacopter recently in order to try and help pay for some insurance-related costs. As I suspected, the drone did not sell - which is good, because I can get back into flying it . So I picked up some goodies this week: VM275T camera/5.8GHz VTX combo - picked this up for my little "frankenstein" Hubsan X4. It's easy to remove the existing camera board and wire in this instead. I wanted to get into FPV flying and this quad is an ideal platform because it's cheap . I was going to wire up the existing camera board to a VTX but this camera has a VTX built in and the whole package is only ~3g, so overall it's going to be lighter. I also picked up a RunCam Micro Swift 2 - this won't be going on my franken-X4, it's too heavy. This is for when I decide that I've practiced enough FPV flying on the X4 and I want to move on to something more... exciting. I haven't actually bought these yet, but they will be mine soon: a buddy of mine at work is willing to part with his practically-new FatShark Dominator V3 FPV goggles for ~£50; he crashed his drone spectacularly a few months ago and has no intention of getting back into the hobby... That's a chuffing good price for a ~£280 headset so I am not going to argue! As for my hexacopter, all I really need is some spare props. I might try drilling out the ones I have - my motor shafts are 8mm with the DJI-style "notched" shaft, but the spare GemFan props I have are 6mm diameter hubs. Sourcing 1045/1047 props with the right hubs is proving difficult, I'm going to have to wait for eBay...
Can you control the drone with the googles mate? Those cameras look interesting as a cat cam, could I make something such as that?
No, the goggles are for viewing the video stream only - you still need the transmitter to control the craft. Technically you're not supposed to fly "first person video"-only under the CAA rules - if you fly with the goggles then you're supposed to have a spotter who maintains line of sight at all times. But who's going to care for a tiny little ~45 gram quad buzzing around an area where there are no people? The worst I'll do is piss off some bees! If you mean a camera that your cat wears, then... Probably not with these cameras. These are designed for FPV use so they can't record video. Their output is either a wire with a composite signal, or a 5.8GHz radio transmission, so you'd need a separate unit that either receives the video and records it, or a separate recorder. The radio range on that tiny little camera won't be huge either. You could probably get similar tiny cameras that can record to SD card, but I think a bigger problem would be the power source: I wouldn't want to strap a lithium ion/lithium polymer battery to one of my cats... A single AAA might be compact enough but it all depends on how much power the camera uses.
I have the fatshark goggles on loan for a while, so I got an FPV camera mounted on my franken-X4: Video quality is...ropey. It's enough for FPV, but it's not great. But that's what this quad is for really: experimenting with and chucking about. Tomorrow I'll get some hot glue out to hold the camera in place - the double-sided foam tape isn't exactly the best. Plus I really need to find some small elastic bands somewhere!
Man, flying FPV is weird. Off to see my mum tomorrow, so if the weather holds I'll take the opportunity to pop down to the park and get a bit of practice in.
I see that DJI have released an FPV module and link using the Occusync tech. If it compares at all with the livestream capacity of the Mavic Pro, I can well imagine it being rather good, but I have no idea about the lag time. I think it's 50ms?
Well, that's about right. First time I take my mini drone out to do some FPV flying and I lose it . Video transmission just dropped out in mid-air and it was nowhere to be found. Spent a little while looking for it, but the grass round there is quite long so I'd practically have to walk on it to find it again. I nearly lost it on a rugby pitch a while back and it was in a bright red body shell at that point - I've got no hope now that it's on a black frame! I don't like the idea of leaving a LiPo battery lying around, but there's not a lot I can do if I can't find it again. I checked the video footage on the goggles but they didn't seem to record anything... Which is odd... Was fun while it lasted though. Ah well, at least it was my ~£40 Hubsan X4 and not something more expensive. RIP little fella! They look super spendy... Bet they're awesome though. Yeah, their page quotes the lag as "as low as 50ms".
Been a while since I have posted here. Havent done many pictures due to photobucket etc and been flat out with work so havent been flying much but I do have some more videos! Also killed another quad and runcam 3 due to putting it into a creek.. oops! I have actually changed my flying style now. Wanted to get into alot smoother movements and tighter gaps. Been hitting up the mini train tracks alot with mixed damage results ( only killed 1 motor and a cam, a few of SMD repairs on 2 escs and a couple of bent batteries. ) first video is the first time I slowed it down by reducing the camera angles and adding more expo.. https://www.airvuz.com/video/Iron-Sky?id=5a08edea3a8bd16105df5a7c next was the latest one I did, again at the train tracks with a few very tight gaps! https://www.airvuz.com/video/Train-Gaps?id=5a2349ada5795e73656aa549 I have also moved away from youtube due to videos getting blocked due to the music... No loss if you ask me and I moved to Airvuz which is a drone specific site. So far so good! And finally I do have a new frame on the way designed by a 16yr old kid in the states! It takes references from the Loflo I normally fly and a few other popular frames and looks to of addressed the niggly issues I had with it. Looking forward to building it up now!
Hi guys Apologies for my first post in this thread being a possibly stupid question. I am looking to get back into RC (previously had cars, boats & a plane), and join my Uncle flying quadcopters. I have put together an order list from Hobbyking, but before ordering, I have gotten myself rather confused. Everything I want is from the UK Warehouse, I am also in the UK, so does the price on their site already include VAT, or do I need to factor that into the budget? I have tried using their live chat, but I don’t think the guy’s first language was English, and so I wasn’t able to get my question answered (only more confused). I have read that I will have to pay in dollars, so there will be the conversion rate to account for, but I cannot find a definitive answer on the VAT. In my own mind, I would say no as the products are already in the UK, but I can find a lot of people online complaining about having to pay VAT, but most of them don’t state what warehouse they ordered from. Thanks
I think you need to factor in VAT though it is not very clear I admit. But look under Tax in the FAQ's. https://hobbyking.com/nl_nl/faq
Yes, it is confusing; too confusing. I had already read that, and it was what started me off looking for an answer. For instance, they say that they do not include tax in their price, but it is your responsibility to pay any local customs fee. However, if the product's origination is in the UK and so is the destination, then it won't pass through customs. So, my thinking is either their UK Warehouse is located on non-UK soil (unlikely), the product won't be shipped from a UK warehouse, in contrary to their web site or the price does include VAT. I think the only way I am going to know for sure is to order part of the order I want, and see if it attracts a charge. Thanks
I've never had to pay VAT on top of any orders I've placed with HobbyKing - I've ordered from both the UK and HK warehouses. Although when ordering from abroad you always take a risk in regards to customs, import charges, etc. The annoying thing with HobbyKing UK is that although they will show prices in GBP, you may not actually get that exact price when you pay. I usually pay through PayPal and their USD to GBP rates are often different to what HobbyKing are using. You're not talking about a lot of money TBH, but it is kind of irritating. It's definitely in the UK - I sent a return there the other week. To be honest the full details are really hazy. I was reading some forum posts on an RC forum which said that although their warehouse is in the UK, when you make a payment you're not actually paying the money to a UK account owned by a UK company - you're paying it to HobbyKing in HK (or China, or wherever their head office is). Therefore the distance selling regs (or whatever replaced DSRs, I can never remember what it's called) technically don't cover you; their returns policy does seem to comply with what the regulations require, but you can't use the regulations to beat them over the head with. I don't know. TBH I've never had any problems with any kit I've had from HobbyKing and the only return I've ever had to do (which was due to an unwise drunken purchase rather than a faulty product) was smooth sailing.
Bought a Furibee F36 recently for the bargaintastic sub £5... It's so much fun getting to grips with the controls! In my opinion I'd say one these is invaluable to get familiar with drones before moving onto the big boys. Also for under £5 it's hard to go wrong but I'm really blown away how manoeuvrable this tiny device is. It barely fills the palm of my hand it's so tiny!
