Strange behavior in my Alien last night. Finally tried a test flight of the new setup with my gimbal mount forward and battery back a tiny bit. This is to attempt to get the props out of the video/photo frame.

On take off my bird would not yaw clockwise, only counter. And it would not hold position. Luckily I was able to land it without doing any damage as I had minimal control. I recalibrated the GPS/compass but still issues. A look at my motor outputs (photo below) shows the clockwise motors are at a much lower output than the other two.

Because of this event I decided to upgrade the firmware on the MiniX flight controller and will probably go through all the stick calibrations again.  More testing soon.

This weekend’s project has been to change my 680mm Alien quadcopter frame to a different one in hopes the different frame is better engineered.  I wasn’t very happy with the design of the old frame and the quad flew very poorly in my opinion because of the way the weight was distributed more toward the front and rear of the UAV.  The concept of the old one was cool, to get the camera more front, but the mass of the battery had to be put way in the back.  This made flying it in anything other than dead calm a teeter totter ride.

New Alien Quadcopter 680 Frame Flies!

The process required ripping the old Alien quad apart and moving all the components/wiring/electronics to the new frame.  That took a couple of partial days to do.  Much of the wiring was custom cut and soldered, so that had to be undone.

The new version is lighter so far.  I’ve decided that though it is cool, I’m not going to put the old retractable landing gear on the new frame.  The new frame came with some very cheap, but super light gear.  That gear also has some finger nuts which allow it to be take off and put back on very easily.  That’s part of the point of this bird, to be able to compact it down to something easy to transport in a backpack or on an airplane etc.  I will be weighing both sets of gear to make a note of the difference in grams.

Today’s maiden flight was a success! IT FLIES. Too windy to do much else other than launch it a few feet.  It was very squirrely due to being lighter and the wind conditions.  The gains are set for a heavier load.

Quadcopter test hover…

Next Steps

Now that I know it flies, I’ll be taking it into the shop again to install the camera gear.  I’ll be putting the old FPV (first person view) camera setup on it, along with a 3-Axis brushless GoPro gimbal.  Hopefully by the time I get that stuff installed the wind will have calmed and I can do more test flying later today.

I’ve now started a new build, the new Arris X-Speed 250 racing quadcopter which was kindly provided for review here by myrcmodel.com.  The basic frame is put together as seen below.

Arris X-Speed 250 Quadcopter Frame

I shot a five minute video of the unboxing and examination of the parts for the basic unassembled kit below.