SOLAR FPV Plane V3 Crash and Testing - RCTESTFLIGHT
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- Опубликовано: 23 июн 2017
- More testing with the solar plane V3. Luckily it survived my bad decision making. I'll do the next test flight in mid August with a 5S.
Many people have suggested using an MPPT charge controller instead of a direct solar tie in. I've tested a Genasun controller with solar plane V1 and it ended up not being as efficient as I had hoped.
Help support my RUclips channel: / danielriley 
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thats not a crash, thats an A+ emergency landing
lacucaracha111111 every Landing is a controlled crash!
every crash is an uncontrolled landing, then.
You seem to imply that is not true.
i can land anywhere. once.
3:48 well..... thermals are pure solar power....
so to speak...👍
Actually the thermals are caused by a flat earth falling down through space
YES; OF COURSE!
and Gravity is caused by Flat earth flying up at the same time, makes perfect sense!
Gravity force is produced by mass and not by accelerating up. This doesn't disprove flat earth theory.
but Flat earth would form a ball because Grvity is pulling stronger on the Outside then the inside.
So why is it that when the earth turns upside down everyone falls off
I was happy to see that the wings survived this time.
Awesome ! Lovely solar power FPV ...... Thanks your video 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻 ☀️✈️
Bad luck on the crash but I cant wait to see if you get it fully solar. Great work!
i hope that you'll continue to do videos while travelling, im always looking foreward to your videos!
Very exciting to see this baby fly again. Love the progress. I'm so glad the landing was relatively safe considering the circumstances. Way to go!
It's nice to see progress in this project! Keep it up!
This project is awesome. I hope you find stuff to share with us from your trip.
Looking forward to your follow up! Enjoy your travels. God speed.
Thanks for the great update! Have a nice trip!!
Good thing you are an experienced pilot Daniel, those crashes could have been catastrophic. Have an awesome time in Nepal and Thailand! Namaste!
Watt a fantastic project you've been developing here.
You are soooooo close to success, I can almost taste it.
Keep the magic happening bro :) .
Can't wait for August! Have a safe trip!
This solar FPV plane videos are so damned exciting
mppt is the way to go.. having it connected directly is a lottery.. specially when the battery is getting low, you can start asking too much amps out of PVC and the voltage will drop also.. P=U*I.. mppt will try to ballance U and I so that the P is maxed no matter how low the impedance (battery level).. same problem when battery is full, only then you don't need charging at all.
Think of it this way.. open circuit PVC has high voltage, no current running.. power = 0. A short circuit PVC has some amps, 0 volts.. power = 0.. somewhere in between there is a sweet spot.
i belive that even if the solar cells are in the most eficient array, because the amount of radiance from the sun changes too much (because plane orentation), and because of the nature of lipo bateries the voltage also changes the best thing to do is use an mppt. if the mppt is noy used then the solar cells are just useless.
and in the wors case depending on the enviroment thr cells can discharge the battery.
1/2 I actually suspect things would go better with a proper switching circuit; an MPPT controller is effectively a buck circuit and designed to chop high voltage down to a lower battery voltage. With the solar panel in parallel with the battery, the battery is going to determine the output on the cell based on the charge of the battery, and the cell will produce less efficiently at lower voltages in the current setup.
2/2 You loose efficiency ( 5 to 25%) by going through the buck converter, and it's not very useful if you're actually almost at the voltage you need anyway. I'm also concerned about the battery charging/being overvoltage. A hybrid approach which actively switches between battery and solar to the ESC, incorporates constant voltage charging and ideally included the ESC, would be ideal. This is, however, a non-trivial Electrial engineering and software task.
Question. I am not very knowledgeable in electronics but would it be better for the power coming from the PVC to go into something that would smooth it out before it went to the ESC or does the ESC do that itself? And please feel free to correct me if I am worng. Just trying to learn.
Love your work. Crossing my fingers for your next test flight.
Another awesome go at beating gravity.Keep that spirit flying!
8:25 and forward a few seconds. Wow! That was an epic emergency landing!
Love your tenancity dude. I enjoy following your projects.
Amazing! Enjoy your trips! looking forward to next episode in august!
Elegant plane! Love the Head up display type camera!!
Instant sub, episode 6 was gorgeous btw. I can't believe the wing flex isn't cracking the mono panels good job
Why have I not found this channel until now. Great videos.
good luck bro, thanks for another great video!
Stone cold rocket man there bud, catching that dead-stick. Nice!
I've been eagerly awaiting this video since spring.
Nice save! Good flight.
enjoyed the video very much. have fun in your trip.
Great video! I saw, crash in the title and when you said you taped the elevator, I was like NOOOOoooooooo. Great landing though! Both times!
I'm so excited to watch this!
I like your experiments a lot!
Great build and investigation. Hoping to hear more about your experiments with charge controllers next time. I wish you safe travels in the East!
you are really great, they way you figure it out and then explain it to us. thank you
cant wait for august
Not so bad decision making, you (and we) learned a lot. If you covered the wing-fuselage area and gave the plane some small aerodynamic refinements you might get by on fractionally less amperage. I would be interested to find the importance of each parameter (relative to each other). A beautifully engineered aircraft. Quite an achievement.
adding a folding prop or at least adding break to the esc would help.
I remember when you built planes out of foam this is just mind blowing to see your channel now
Thanks for sharing. Keep up the great work.
Great video man, awesome solar glider
Nice catch!
Thanks for posting this excellent video. I'm impressed with the quality of your solar wing, it looks really great. Using a charge controller (MPPT or PWM) is the way to go. There are good reasons why every solar installation uses them and you are probably aware of them. I'll just mention the most important one for you which is optimizing solar output. As you've seen the efficiency of the panels depends on the load that is put on them. That is why MPPT are called what they are called. They use DC/DC conversion to put the panels in the best possible load scenario even if the target load is different. 5s Vs 6s depends only on how you want to drive your motor. If your motor can handle 6s then that would be the battery to use. Then find an MPPT for that voltage.
Good luck with your project and I hope you keep posting updates. Your plan to test on the ground makes sense of course. Your LED load is a bit exotic when a simple heat dump would do but it makes for good youtubing.
Great video--a pleasure to watch and learn.. Let us know when you make your first million.
Nice job ! Well done. I like it!
hey,
great video and project in general, I followed it from the start until now.
For a somehow similar project we needed to charge and discharge the battery for many times during use, so here I will tell you my experiences for your problem with the too low solar cell voltage (or too high LiPo voltage).
In the course of a diploma thesis we used a gasoline engine and a generator to create the energie for a X12-Copter with 20kg take of weight instead of LiPo batteries, in order to achive longer flight times (due to the times 80 higher energie density of petrol).
We discovered the following:
LiPos do not like to be charged and discharged in a rapid sequence, so it will die quite soon. Lithium-Iron-Phosphate (LiFePo4) batteries are much better for this purpose, furthermore they can handle higher charging rates too. We used a DIY 7S battery out of A123 System 2500mAh LiFePo4 cells (like the one TESLA uses).
For your purpose it would be ideal, because the nominal and maximum voltage of LiFePo4s is lower than LiPos (3.3V nominal and 3.6 maximum), a 6S LiFePo4 will have a maximum of 21.6V.
Furthermore, they are more rigit and because the battery consists of single cells, you can distribute them in the plane as you like to achive the best CG.
Hope I could help a bit, for further information feel free to contact me, and keep up the good work!!
Ya, LiFePo4 would be a good choice since apart from having lower energy density, are more like ideal batteries with superior power density. They make some smaller 1000mAh cells that would be better for this application. They aren't really being abused like your application sounds like but they would be good here.
Good job catching the Plane. :D
Do you have a patch antenna for your FPV gear? Because it's directional, you could point it around and see which direction the craft is in.
Beautiful plane! Even after the ditch! I learn good things from watching You're diagnostics of the flights. Though My plane is conventional, You are dealing with the same laws of physics. I agree with the other postings about continuing to post of Your travels!!!
Great video! I would recommend watching GreatScott's videos on solar charge converters. You should also include a cutoff circuit to prevent overcharging your lipos, especially when using the 5S battery.
Very nice video i truly enjoyed!
That's a worthwhile project bro. You may get a contract from the military or gov. Amazing.
Very interesting. Have fun in Thailand Daniel, don't catch anything nasty :-)
Thank you - that was a cool plane. Have a good trip to Thailand/Nepal
Been waiting for this!
Wonderful research! Thank you!
I'm interested to see where you take this project. It's being done by a few other groups and organisations.
I don't know much about the power supply process for balancing power sources but I'm sure there is information and existing technology to help you design the most efficient system. Maybe switching between solar and battery, allowing for excess solar energy to be stored, or some kind of continuous balancing circuit. Or even two separate circuit for redundancy. I'm sure there's a number of options.
Good stuff mate, your interest is fuelling my interest.
I'm here before this becomes viral!
(2k views)
holly shit you grabbed that plane like a boss. dam man. great video
This channel is so good 👌🏻
Why dont you wire a small dc-dc buck booster converter between the solar panels output and the esc? Set the converter to output constant 25.2V and also limit its current to max solar panel output current or to your battery max charging rate (if solar panels could provide such high amp) whichever is lower. Put a compatible diode in series with battery to prevent battery to "charge" the solar panel. No mater the input voltage from solar panels, your motor/battery will be able to suck any small amp from the panels (just like solar systems usually do).
In what way is the electricity different if it comes from a solar panel and battery than from a Dc-dc converter? You're just paying the penalty of the losses from the conversion and creating a bunch of switching noise in your airplane.
Dude, you have no idea what you are talking about. Dutra is right. Trust me. The setup in this video is just asking for a crash. Which would you prefer - reliability OR 2 more minutes of flight time? Moreover, the entire purpose of the solar panel is so that he can get unlimited juice.
With all due respect, the problems he had with his ESC control weren't fundamentally caused by his connection between the solar panel and the battery. The ESC just needs a low impedance path to a power source in the voltage range that its designed to operate. From the standpoint of the ESC, it just thinks its connected to a battery, which is the typical way you power an electric power airplane.
Solar panels dc voltage output is a function of solar incidence on panels and it may be much lower (and usually is) than the max voltage the solar panel is rated and also much lower than your lipo voltage as well. It may happen during all the flight... In addition to that, if a solar panel is loaded, its voltage will drop (in a similar way than lipos suffer from voltage sag under load).... you need a dc-dc buck-booster converter just as any solar system does (in order to store the available energy from panels in li-ion cell packs in home systems), no matter there is a shiny bright sun outside or a lot of clouds.
I agree with Durta. The way he has it set up if the solar panels are not making more power than the battery is providing they are dead weight. The output of the buck converter would at least take some of the load from the battery which will extend his flight time. His wing might not have enough surface area to reliably power the whole aircraft.
I would make a lipo charger that is light and small using a dc-dc step-down module (or step-up depending on the voltage difference) and a shunt resistor to measure the amps. The output voltage could be adjusted by an arduino(nano) depending of the current this could be an proper lipo charger with constant current. It is also similar to a power led driver and I know you are into LEDs ;) Keep up the amazing job Daniel!
favorite series on yt
That's awesome! inspired me to try building one similar to yours
wow Such a cool concept to use solar on your plane.
Felicidades, me gustó tu proyecto!! 👏👏👏👏👏👍
Would love to see some build videos on this beast one thing I've noticed is that your solar panels are set down in the wings and will likely suffer some shade from the wing structure and since any shade on any part of a solar cell severely affects the overall performance of a solar cell and in turn the whole string 😊
Great video - love the concept! I will be staying tuned to see this project evolve for sure. Something I have been thinking about, but don't have the know-how... yet... Which OSD are you using here? Oh, and I REALLY hope you are taking something FPV with you to Thailand & Nepal! :-)
wow charging a 5s with 80watts that a lot... nice job looking forward to the test flight mate
great catch :D
Nice catch.
Really cool project👍
Have a safe vacation!
Love your videos!!!!
ohhh, good catch. hahaha. good men. i love what you are doing
i liked your work
well done
Voltage from the panels needs to be higher than the battery voltage or they won't charge at all. Batteries will pull the voltage down from the panels, but that is normal. Put a charge controller on it if you are worried about overcharging the battery pack or putting to high of a voltage on the batteries. Very cool plane, love the design and the HUD you have set up.
Great video as always. Some interesting testing and problem solving.
How about getting the front of the pod slimmed down somehow and using a folding prop? At least belly landing when there's no other option may reduce the chance of damage to the prop, motor and also, most importantly, the wing.
Regarding recharging the batteries you can add voltage regulating stages. Texas Instruments has this voltage booster specialized in energy harvesting (BQ25570) which I don't think is directly suitable to what you need, but with some tweaking an research it can be done. For sure there are other chips that help.
It will be a fun project to design a circuit that milks every drop of energy from those solar panels. Great plane btw.
That was sick. Have a good trip to Thailand.
I'm 72 years old and not as quick as you probably are. When I'm traipsing around in snake infested grass, I carry a 38 caliber revolver with number 9 rat shot. It's basically just a point-and-click system and will turn a diamond back into confetti 20 feet away. Food for thought.
Have a nice trip.
can you provide a link to the clear wrap you are using on the wings? cheers, love the videos by the way!!
Great video, wonderful project, but because your graph has two different voltage legends it hides that your power problem for your solar panel is completely voltage based.
Also, you could build a rudimentary solar controller that matches voltages by switching in and out a string of diodes to allow the panels to sit at the voltage they prefer (18.whatever) while providing good power to a lower voltage battery.
what's the flight time on a good clear day? do you have batteries for the hd cam & fpv cam? or are they both powered by the solar panels..? Id take the HD cam off of it if so. or use a small lipo for the hdcam..
great work :)
wow good job sir !
can we get more frequent updates on this please, im attempting a solar plane project of my own
If you're able to arrange the panels in strings that give 30-36 volts you could try a tiny PWM solar reg, or if you can get PV volts between 30 & 60 you could try to get hands on a small MPPT and use that. Either way, add a current sensor inline after the PV reg before it connects to the power system, then you can subtract PV gen current from the ESC drawn current and hopefully display that somewhere in the OSD, that way you'll know that a reading of 0A means power neutral, a positive reading means battery is charging and a negative reading means battery is discharging.
I like your project, good luck with it!
Maybe consider two 6s lipos. One running the plane, and the other charging. Then have the switch when one is getting low. Try adding some super caps to offset the current of the motor start up. I think an arduino could switch and monitor the batteries. There is probably a simpler circuit that would do the same with less draw. This is amazing! Thanks for sharing this!!! :-)
This is awesome!
I love how you call a snake a snek
Just ran across your channel. Great job with the plane. For the solar voltage to battery problem, I would HIGHLY suggest using a resistor as a voltage limiter. Assuming you want to limit the weight.
This way you can put the voltage a little higher then the battery to charge voltage and the resistor will drop that to the correct battery charge voltage. Also realize you want a higher voltage then the battery at rest voltage, I am assuming Li-Ion at 25.2 volts, I would suggest bringing the Solar panels up to around 36V with a resistor, now the resistor size will be determined by the load resistance of the system. but in general for this you will want a 1:5 setup. EG if your system has a 500 ohm resistance then the resistor needs to be 100 ohms.
Lithium Ion you really can't mess with the charging voltage, so I would suggest going with a charge controller and doubling your solar panels. Just remember, you will need a higher voltage then the charge voltage of the battery, most MPPT's need at least 50% higher solar cell voltage, EG this is at 25.2v you would need the cells to put out at least 38V.
Now, I can tell you right now, those solar cells are NOT 23.4v, that is probably open circuit voltage, not nominal, also the cell tempt effects the voltage, so warmer day, lower voltage and lower amperage.
Get a MPPT lipo charge controller, there are small, light weight and cheap pcbs avalible and ebay, banggood, aliexpress etc.. Just search for mppt on those sites.. Great video as always !
nice catch
Seems like you could just run it off of direct solar without a battery. I'd think of it like a glider with a solar boost. Perhaps the control surfaces and FPV gear could be powered by a normal battery, and the ESC would only be powered by the solar panels.
Very nice... Cool!!! Good job :) :) :)
One ironic thing about this test flight is that it shows that the solar energy heating the ground, creating thermals, is as much a factor for sustained flight as the photovoltaics in the wings. The same conditions for maximum solar electricity (midday sun) are the same for making thermals. A wing with large enough area to collect the needed solar energy is also large enough to thermal well.
I love how you "I believe it's second June" or 2:35
I would recommend programming the ESC to brake the motor when you turn it off, as this will help improve your gliding capabilities.
good work. I like to watch your progress.
Just and advice: Don't connect the battery direct to the panels.
if the panel produce to low voltage than the battery then the panels work as a load .. and take power from the battery and turn it into heat.
Instead use a 12V/24V 20A Solar Panel Charger Controller Regulator. If possible try a mppt solar charger. These are more efficient.
You connect the panels and battery to it. And the motor to the output of the charger.
I am sure you will then get a unlimited flight time.