You could build a bright flashing Led for location of lost drones in dark areas. Just send up another drone and scan for the flashing LED. Another Idea, add a radio beacon and make a radio direction finder. Rainbow Kits sold a pretty good one. It used a charge pool capacitor and a rotating 4 antenna doppler array. It was quite good.
I wouldn't mind that, as I had planned to make a "spare" with the extra parts anyway. I'm not too optimistic about finding it though, and hadn't planned on flying it very far away in the first place but things changed quickly.
Thanks, yeah I thought about searching with the mavic but our woods is open enough that it's probably on the ground yet at the same time the trees are dense enough to make it hard to spot. Plus if it's caught up in the trees I'd probably leave it there. I saw a video with one mavic airlifting another from a tree but I'd be more likely to get them both stuck. I just try to look on the bright side - losing the first one motivated me to get the mavic and it's a much better (but alas much pricier) video platform.
Very much enjoying thus series, and have learnt so much. I’ve been looking to add drones to my r/c repertoire for a while but didn’t want a one-task dedicated drone. I can hardly believe my luck stumbling upon this series. One of the uses I have in mind is a drone for lifting lightweight gliders up high on a hot, windless day, then releasing them so I can hunt thermals. I’d need a ‘go home’ gps set-up, but I see you haven’t made that instalment, yet... Is it in the pipeline? Cheers from the UK.
hi Jay, if you ever need antennas for your fpv, check out this site, he is my cousin :) TrueRC Canada. Don't know if it will help you. I really like your videos, started this morning to watch with the machining ones up to the drones :) Jean-Pierre
I suspect that your video disruption is predominantly caused by EMI generated during motor commutation. All the cheap ESCs I have implement simple MOSFET half bridges which dump kinetic energy back into the battery via the MOSFETs' body diodes (on deceleration). Forward biasing these diodes can generate lots of high frequency noise during the diode's reverse recovery phase, in addition to the standard switching transients. Apparent difference with antenna placement and flying elevation could be explained by different EMI coupling from wire placement/length and different air currents near the surface (i.e. less stable auto-leveling control loop). If you haven't solved the video issues, try powering your camera, overlay chip and transmitting radio from a separate battery, with the flight battery monitoring lines isolated using a common mode choke and/or resistors and/or ferrite beads. If the mainboard is doing the battery voltage monitoring and sending it to the overlay chip via UART/digital means, complete galvanic isolation could be achieved with optocouplers or a Silabs digital isolator instead.
+BrainRight That's a good idea. Clamped to your vice/workbench, you'll also be able to take a ferrite or air core inductor, connect it across an oscilloscope probe's tip and GND, and then hover it near your circuity as a makeshift dI/dt antenna to pseudo quantitatively see the on-board noise spectrum and localization. Given your radio expertise, you may have a spectrum analyzer at your disposal for the best measurements, but an oscilloscope FFT plot works well by itself. With an ability to observe the noise, you might be able to measure the effects of various filtering changes. Adding ~0.1uF (perhaps +/- a decade or two) ceramic capacitors in various places might not show up on the crude oscilloscope wand, but may prove more valuable than the big aluminum electrolytic capacitor you have in the video (aluminum capacitors are useless for high frequency noise suppression).
Great stuff! I love learning from your videos
Thanks, glad you find them useful.
You could build a bright flashing Led for location of lost drones in dark areas. Just send up another drone and scan for the flashing LED. Another Idea, add a radio beacon and make a radio direction finder. Rainbow Kits sold a pretty good one. It used a charge pool capacitor and a rotating 4 antenna doppler array. It was quite good.
"so I built a new one" . you are bound to find the old one now ;- )
I wouldn't mind that, as I had planned to make a "spare" with the extra parts anyway. I'm not too optimistic about finding it though, and hadn't planned on flying it very far away in the first place but things changed quickly.
You could search for the lost drone with the help of the mavic pro if it's still in the trees.
awesome videos btw!!!
Thanks, yeah I thought about searching with the mavic but our woods is open enough that it's probably on the ground yet at the same time the trees are dense enough to make it hard to spot. Plus if it's caught up in the trees I'd probably leave it there. I saw a video with one mavic airlifting another from a tree but I'd be more likely to get them both stuck. I just try to look on the bright side - losing the first one motivated me to get the mavic and it's a much better (but alas much pricier) video platform.
Very much enjoying thus series, and have learnt so much. I’ve been looking to add drones to my r/c repertoire for a while but didn’t want a one-task dedicated drone. I can hardly believe my luck stumbling upon this series. One of the uses I have in mind is a drone for lifting lightweight gliders up high on a hot, windless day, then releasing them so I can hunt thermals. I’d need a ‘go home’ gps set-up, but I see you haven’t made that instalment, yet... Is it in the pipeline? Cheers from the UK.
Put a little epoxy glue around the USB connector on the flight controller board, these clones are notorious for having that pull right off.
Thanks, I will!
... Ye R going 2 use this NEW DRONE to search the last flight path, got 2 B around there somewhere ...
Good job and I wish I can be able to build my own drone but it's not easy in this part of the world Africa
Hi Brain right 👍
Pls upload a video about how to make drone with vr 360 and GPS
nice sir I am big fan you
Thanking you......
You're welcome, glad you liked it.
How much flight time?
Any true pilots comes trough lost drones. I'too.
hi Jay, if you ever need antennas for your fpv, check out this site, he is my cousin :) TrueRC Canada. Don't know if it will help you. I really like your videos, started this morning to watch with the machining ones up to the drones :)
Jean-Pierre
hatss off ..can i have your email sir in order to have guidelines
I suspect that your video disruption is predominantly caused by EMI generated during motor commutation. All the cheap ESCs I have implement simple MOSFET half bridges which dump kinetic energy back into the battery via the MOSFETs' body diodes (on deceleration). Forward biasing these diodes can generate lots of high frequency noise during the diode's reverse recovery phase, in addition to the standard switching transients. Apparent difference with antenna placement and flying elevation could be explained by different EMI coupling from wire placement/length and different air currents near the surface (i.e. less stable auto-leveling control loop).
If you haven't solved the video issues, try powering your camera, overlay chip and transmitting radio from a separate battery, with the flight battery monitoring lines isolated using a common mode choke and/or resistors and/or ferrite beads. If the mainboard is doing the battery voltage monitoring and sending it to the overlay chip via UART/digital means, complete galvanic isolation could be achieved with optocouplers or a Silabs digital isolator instead.
Thanks for the suggestions. I may try strapping the drone down so I can observe the video over a range of motor speeds with nothing else changing.
+BrainRight That's a good idea. Clamped to your vice/workbench, you'll also be able to take a ferrite or air core inductor, connect it across an oscilloscope probe's tip and GND, and then hover it near your circuity as a makeshift dI/dt antenna to pseudo quantitatively see the on-board noise spectrum and localization. Given your radio expertise, you may have a spectrum analyzer at your disposal for the best measurements, but an oscilloscope FFT plot works well by itself.
With an ability to observe the noise, you might be able to measure the effects of various filtering changes.
Adding ~0.1uF (perhaps +/- a decade or two) ceramic capacitors in various places might not show up on the crude oscilloscope wand, but may prove more valuable than the big aluminum electrolytic capacitor you have in the video (aluminum capacitors are useless for high frequency noise suppression).
Plz reply me
Hlo 🎉