Arducopter hexa flies on its own !

Latest video of testing autonomous flight (and other flightmodes)



Video flight at the university of Leuven (Belgium) :



Cause I like the way a hexacopter looks (and everyone already has a quad) I wanted to build me an autonomous flying hexa.

I found a suitable electronic brain at DIYdrones, an open source project :



You can buy it ready soldered, but I wanted to solder the pins on myself :






Motors, esc's and battery ofcourse come from our favorite rc supplier hobbyking :

motors : http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idproduct=4700


esc's : http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idproduct=6458


battery : http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idproduct=9184


I decided to design and build the frame myself since HK doesn't have hexa frames (yet).

The arms are made from 15x15x1.5 aluminium square tube with holes drilled in them to save weight :





From work I could get some leftovers from the composites department. A little bit special as it is a natural fiber composite. Lighter then carbonfiber, but not so strong. But also non conductive (no blocking 2.4Ghz signals).
I designed the parts in autocad and had them cut on a waterjet.



Composite parts are 2mm thick and together they weigh 170g. A complete aluminium arm, with motor, esc and prop attached weighs 140g. So I estimate that with a 5000mAh 3S lipo of 410g I'll end up with a total flying weight of about 1600-1700g.

Thrust of the motors with 10x4.5 prop is about 900g. So I should get about 900x6x0.8 = 4.3kg of total lift force. Leaves me enough room to carry around a camera.

I made the frame foldable for easy transport. But in reality I have never used this possibility yet.




Vibration dampening is extremely important with multicopters. That's why I mounted a piece of rubber between arms and centerplate.




Powerdistribution was a serious challenge to my soldering skills.   



Here's the frame build togehter with motors and esc's :







And here he is flying :-) :



Nevermind the beautiful female students :-)

Edited by u4eake - 04/Oct/2011 at 5:55am

Yeah, the wind wasn't too constant (about 2-3 beaufort) but I think most swinging is comming from my camera mount. It was basically hanging in rubber bands, which does not seem to be so good for stabilisation.

Finally altitude hold is working fine on my arducopter hexa :



It's a terrain following radar now !

Latest video of testing autonomous flight (and other flightmodes).
This was really fun testing and finetuning to get this far with an open source project.
And more is still to come !

very very nice


$250.00 ....

Edited by marcospratas - 04/Oct/2011 at 7:37pm