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.
So, with my tax return, I’ve ordered a lot of new parts. First I’m getting a Spektrum Dx8 transmitter with telemetry. This means that the Rx can report back to the Tx information such as temperature and battery voltage. Particularly I’m interested in the battery voltage.
I’ve also ordered the 3dRobotics 3DR-B frame kit and the ArduPilotMega v2 controller board with sonar. The APM has all the usual sensors plus GPS and sonar, and it also uses the new Invensense MPU6000 Sensor Fusion technology. And lastly I’ve got a telemetry kit (Xbee) coming.
This also means that this new quad will be using ArduPilot instead of AeroQuad. It’ll be interesting to see how the AP software pans out compared to AQ.
I’ll be using the same motors and batteries that I use on my current quad, but I’ve also ordered new props (10x4.5 slowflyers).
Build log and photos once the parts start to arrive.