Wow, it’s been an eventful week - lots of projects are now coming to the point where I can actually DO stuff with them, so now it’s a matter of prioritization.  Of course, Diablo 3 was released this week which threw an additional spanner in the works.

I just got my new Hobbyking F-30 ESCs for the new quad I’m building.  Now, I specifically picked these ESCs because they are a great candidate for using the SimonK ESC firmware on.  This firmware is custom-written to be suitable for multicopters, and has far superior response characteristics to standard firmware.  The F-30 has a few features which make it a good pick (I think) for this firmware;

As part of the new set of quadcopter parts I’ve ordered, I received my 3DR Radio 915MHz kit yesterday.  This little beauty is about half the price of an equivalent XBee Pro, smaller and lighter, and also can inject signal strength data into the MAVlink telemetry packets.  It’s also very, very new.

I finally got an ATmega2560, and therefore went and updated my Bus Pirate extensions to support memory paging on it.  The fix wasn’t too extensive, just a matter of having some hardware on hand to test it.

As I believe I mentioned earlier, my Hobbyking HK-7x transmitter got fried pretty badly when I foolishly blew it up trying to recharge the batteries.  Anyway, I’ve swapped over to a Hobbyking HK-T6A transmitter, and frankly it’s pretty terrible.  There’s an incredible amount of jitter on the receiver outputs, bad enough that it affects my ability to fly the quad.  It also seems to drift out of calibration very quickly.  Quite disappointing, but I guess I can’t complain too much, it’s a very cheap Tx.