Any advice for a FLYING FROG willing to pay top dollar for extra ketchup!

Yup it sure is tough slaving away all day.

Anyway back to your build. Like these guys are saying, between Andy's video, this forum, and you can always email us also (support@quadrocopter.com) you should be OK. I would just say if you are unsure of something just ask first, rather than release the magic smoke, and then ask questions. Not that anyone here has done anything like that.

 

I too thought I could get up and running in a short period of time. Boy was I wrong. You can't build everything in 7 days, it's just not feasible. You might be able to build and setup the frame and electronics in 3 days but you need to be very careful and delibrate from everything from the soldering, to the wiring, to the settings you choose in MKtools. There is just too much to become familiar with and you can't do it just like that. If you take short cuts it will burn you. It's going to take you some time to become familiar with the radio and how you want the switches configured. It's going to take you a bit of time to get comfortable with all the controls. Then you need to be come familiar with the battery charger and accessories and put the lipos through a series of charges and discharges and carefully monitor the batteries to make sure everything looks good. Then you have start testing the copter through its paces and maybe install a FPV camera.Then you need to research, purchase, install and test the downlink and monitor station. You might possibly need to adjust the transmitter and antenna placement. Then you need to upgrade the radio and receiver firmware to get the voice commands to work. After all this then you need to balance your camera gimbal after you decided which camera you want to go with. After the camera gimble is installed you should make sure your copter is balanced once you have all the equipment on. Then you need to setup all the software settings for the gimbal. IF you go with the radians it will probably take you longer than if you go with the 2 axis gimble-flight controller setup. After you get to this point you will need to worry about a 2nd downlink and radio setup if you are going to use a camera person. Then you will need to balance the entire copter with camera and gimbal to make sure its all good. Then you need to train the camera operator.

If you press yourself and rush through it you will make many mistakes along the way and then chase your tail. This is why I started assembly in Late November so that I hope to start filming with a camera operator in April. I won't start filming around people until I have at least 6 months of experience and I have a 3rd person as a spotter. I'm hoping by the end of the summer I will start having some good footage for a portfolio that I am trying to create. I plan on video taping professionally but I am going to write off this entire year as a learning curve. I'm not saying that it will take you this to get up to speed like I am doing but I think you can't put a time frame on it. I think you need to take it step by step and see where it takes you. It's my experience that projects like this never go as expected and always take more time, money, and patience than you think. This doesn't even take into any account for any unexpected crashes that come along the way. I would try to do this like you would any major project and do it in stages and see where that gets you.

Another reason why I am in no hurry is because we can't insure these types of birds until the FCC puts some formal policies in place. I won't be flying around people until I know that I have the experience under my belt, and have the insurance to protect myself and my equipment.

Just my little 2 cents from someone who is going through what you will be going through.

Good luck with the project.


Dave

 

My $0.02 worth (mind the exchange rate) is that in a perfect world, a 24/7 (or almost) build schedule is feasible, but you will find that there'll be one widget, one tool, some wire that you need and the local hobby shop (if you even have one) will claim doesn't exist. You might get lucky and get the thing from Amazon, Quadrocopter.com or Mikrokopter.us, but you may also have to get it from HobbyKing, and it could take weeks.

So be realistic, and accept that you're wandering into a dark cave with just a flashlight and a bottle of water, and the going can be...interesting. But if it was easy, the skies would be full of UAVs and we'd all be doing something else.

 

I am thinking along the same lines as Dave. I got mine in december and the 2 months of building as i posted before were hampered but aligning, and programming the camera gimbal is an entirely different project. After you build the main system (the heli) getting them both to work together is an interesting part.

I wasn't planning on officially doing work until the summer when the weather got better, giving me safer days to fly. but now looking at the learning curve on getting steady video, not to mention safety of people/property around you, as well as yourself (http://forum.freeflysystems.com/ind...-the-hand-that-feeds-it.804/page-2#post-10324)
I am strongly thinking about waiting until I have a lot more practice under my belt before I start. For me this might lead to a loss in business, as guys are already approaching me to film. but I'd rather loose business now than be sued later.
(I jumped the gun an did over estimate the ease of the control of the heli and nearly had a heli on person accident about a month ago. the heli was less than 2 ft off the ground and it hard strafed to the right and up a hill and in to an elderly man at the rc race track. luckily I had killed the motors before it reached him and he rolled back and put his feet in-between him and the heli with no incident. I grounded the heli for the rest of the day to find out why that happened. )

The Bermuda flight authority is unsure of what to do about this type of craft. So I am also unsure if I can get it insured without some sort of licensing.

But yeah in the end it did take me 2 months to build but im glad it did cause if I didn't have those set backs in the build i prob would have rushed out faster than I did in excitement and gotten in to worse trouble. Just take your time, baby steps. All the fantastic vids you see are a lot of time and work just practicing to know your macine in programming, mechanics, and control.

Good luck have fun with it but be careful and dont rush it.

 

To add my two cents I 100% agree with Andy. Aerosimrc IMO is a must. I still use it to practice when I don't feel like pressing my luck with an 8000 machine. They have an entire copter training curriculum, once you finish that you have some idea of how these things fly.

Second if you are going to be using spekrum transmitters get the blade Mqx. It comes with its own tx however it will bind to the spectrum tx's. This is a good tool to learn "the monkey skills required" to do simple things like hovering in place. Forces you to fly using raw piloting kills, they have no automation like altitude hold or our fancy position hold.

In addition to Andy I recommended a cheap intermediary copter, either a larger quad or some other multirotor in between. I have a small hex that I buil for under $500 from hobby king. It is my second multirotor after I built the hex to carry gopro. I have found it is very usefull to practice shots and maneuvers that I intend to do on the Cinestar withou the fear of trashing 8000 plus dollars. In fact I use my dji f550 to practice fpv flying. It is larger than an MQX but cheaper than a cs8 so a mistake on that frame will cost about 50 bucks at the most to fix versus 500 or more. The entire dji f550 frame costs a whole 28 dollars

Like Andy said about 10 hours or so to really get comfortable with the CS. I would suggest flying t he CS in baby steps. It seems that a lot of accidents happen because people get too comfortable too quick with there machine and are not ready when that "oh shit" moment happens. These things can get away from you pretty quick. If you are practicing automated flying I would put it at a high enough altitude like 100 feet but keep it close monitor it to recover. Sometimes automation I.e altitude hold or position hold do not do what they are supposed to. You should always be ready to turn it off and manually recover. Reading this forum it seems that a lot of mishaps occur when people are relying on the automation too much, and fail to recognize the automation is not doing what it supposed like altitude hold is on and the copter is in a gradual descent until ground impact. Long story short every time you fly be ready for an unexpected event!

 

Brad, excellent points! I recently had a case where my client really wanted one last shot, and I had to say "no" because I was not confident in my battery levels. I'm flying dual 8000mA packs and I always land at 14.5V or so. Definitely enough to fly for another minute or two, but definitely not comfortable taking off at that voltage level.

Batteries are much cheaper than your reputation.

 

How does the Spektrum telemetry compare to the Graupner feed from the MK stack? I tend to put a lot of faith in those voltage numbers the Frau Graupner whispers in my ear.

 

Ahh, yes. That was a major selling point of the CS8/MK setup for me.
Maximum information, maximum safety, maximum reliability, and maximum day rate.

 

this is a thread ive found worthy of printing out in its entirety!!!!!

 

Both of mine report .3 volts less than the actual bat than what the MK stack reports to my smart osd. Found out through another forum that it appears this is an issue with spectrum TM1000.