Marc's Public Blog - Remote Control Aircraft

In my pictures from SCCMAS RC Airshow in 2008, I was surprised to see some familiar airplanes 6 years later. I guess some of them are tough :)

Here is a very quick video summary. The interesting craft was the airplane that was coupled with a quadcopter for VTOL :)

For quicker browsing, here is a link to the pictures on google photos.

Very nice lineup of planes:

The show started with gliders:

Nice bird :)

some real birds were competing in the show :)

Next, we got planes:

One plane even launched a parachute :)

3D planes were as impressive as always:

The fun aircrafts were there again:

Helis:

This plane/quadcopter aircraft was quite interesting, you can see it more in the youtube video at the top:

This was a fun day, glad to had been there again.

Initially the idea is to send 5V from the APM side to the analog side. To avoid ground loops and burning the video chip, I also did the recommended ground connection on both sides:

Next, I added some small heatsinks on both chips, it's especially important for the video chip that can overheat and die, bad if you're flying when that happens :)

Now, once you power the analog side from the 5V rail, it's not regulated and the video chip tends to die by the time votlage reaches 5.3V, so I added a 5.1V zener diode to get rid of possible voltage spikes. With that, while my first OSD died after minimal use, the 2nd one has worked great so far:

But one last thing I did was to realize that since I was powering my camera with 5V too and my transmitter was already providing a perfectly good 5V signal, I might as well poewr the entire thing from the transmitter side. For that, I added another wire going across with a jumper to let me pick whether 5V comes from the analog side, or the APM. Another thing to note is that powering the OSD from the APM internal power works, but is out of spec if you're also powering the video chip, so it's another reason to just power all of the OSD from its analog side and the video transmitter power supply.

5V power to the digital side from the analog side

While I have an overpowered 250W motor, taking off with the extra weight is not the problem, but shoving all that extra stuff in the very tight bay was kind of challenging.
I got a few flights out of it, and then had a short circuit which burned the APM, but thankfully that happened on the ground, and it'll be fine with a new APM I already have at home.

The APM happens to fit upside down just above the battery:

All this stuff so barely fits, and you can see the transmitter and antenna on the tail:

The supposedly APM 2.6 chinese clone board I got was actually a 2.5 with built in compass. It took me a while to figure that out, and I had to cut the trace to the compass for my external compass to finally start working. I do not recommend buying from goodluckbuy on ebay or elsewhere, they ship totally untested stuff that wasn't even meant to work together. I found multiple problems in what they shipped and they didn't seem super interested when I told them what was wrong and what they should change. But worse, in my 2nd shipment, I got a GPS board that had no GPS on it, and 3DR clone radios that just didn't work. Lesson learned, don't buy from them.

I put a basic fatshark for FPV, and make a custom mount out of a piece of metal:

The problem is that my gear collapsed on one landing and the plane landed on the camera, breaking off the top. It was a total mess putting the lens back together after the bits fell out, and even more work gluing the thing back on in a way that the picture was shark on all 4 corners (damn that was super hard, I ended up using putty to hold it until the picture looked good, and glued it then, but that took hours).

This is what the circular polarized antennas look like inside:

And I had to do special wiring to send 5V to the camera while sending 12V to the OSD (from the 12V power supply coming out of the transmitter)

I ended up learning the basics of how it all works and doing a few successful test flights on my minimag before the APM died. This let me redo this on my glider much faster with what I learned on the minimag.