I really want to get the best results out of my Y-6 Multicopter camera platform and I know a big part of that is reducing motor/prop vibrations in the airframe. I’m looking into a dynamic balancer for the purpose because even with static balancing there are still vibes. The system is not running smoothly and must be fixed!

Of course a cheap dynamic balancer would be quite expensive I figured, seeing as I found one for close to $2500 for a hobby grade device that’s already been built and uses LASERS (oh joy of joys!), I’ve been researching options.

I’ve found a few solutions for balancing on a hobby budget. The first one I came across was just using accelerometers and an oscilloscope to measure the vibration. It’s really basic but not a bad idea.

The second one I came across was a a well documented and well made dynamic balancer from Technologie-Entwicklung Baumgart which requires the use of machining tools and electronics work (yay!!! ?) This one uses an piezo electric biomorphs (buzzers lol) and LOTS of science whoo!

The third dynamic balancer I found was for ducted fans from Bob’s Workshop in the UK, but looks pretty cool and it’s only 120 pounds!

I also found a handy spreadsheet for balancing rotating objects and apparently the second page shows all the formulas, you can find it here on Conrad Hoffman’s page as an XLS (excel spreadsheet) under ‘Balancing Rotating Objects’

I’m still hunting and searching, but I know I wont be satisfied until I can super accurately balance these motors and props!

If you have any recommendations yourself or cool ideas or something pops into your mind, please speak up, I’m a totally open chalkboard at this point and I’m looking for something cool and functional.

***All links open in new windows***

I did a lot of reading and shopping for which flight controller to purchase and while I would like to experiment with the open source software and hardware variants out there I really wanted to start with a very stable and well reviewed flight controller(FC) system first to get familiar with the hardware end of things. I decided to go with the DJI Wookong M (WK-M) flight controller and I think I made a good choice.

When I bought the WK-M it was on a special deal which included the DJI F450 quadcopter frame. I built my first quad on the F450 with a shed load of Turnigy/Hobbyking motors and electronic speed controllers(ESCs) for the power system. The photo below is of the DJI F450 FireWheel frame with the GoPro Hero 2 camera mounted to it.

The FireWheel quad used 4 Turnigy 2215J brushless motors (250 watts, 3s) with 4 Turnigy Super Brain ESCs and 2 2200mAh 3s battery packs. The Super Brain controllers have built in flight data recording for power used, voltages, current, etc throughout the flight and they were pretty slow as far as throttle response according to some data on another site. One website quoted them at 200ms response time between when you made a throttle change to when the ESC actually ramped the output to that throttle setting. I had to set the gains on the DJI WK-M very low to get stable flight, but it flew okay indoors with no wind. I later switched to Turnigy Plush 30A controllers with no flight data logging which have a 120ms response time and overall the F450 flew much better.  Below is a video of the F450 FireWheel frame with the Super Brain controllers at the Ulster County Community Center indoor flying event which happens once a month.

I also had an unfortunate crash with my quadcopter where the Super Brain ESC cut out and caused the multicopter to flip and crash into the ground. Fortunately the F450 FireWheel frame is SUPER tough and was not damaged. I ended up replacing the bad ESC and 1 brushless motor and things were back to being good.

My real goal was to build an FPV multicopter aerial video platform so I can see what I’m recording from the multicopter’s view while recording on my Sony HD or GoPro Hero2 camera. Some would call this a drone, but I don’t intend of flying out of my own line of site with this aircraft like you can with a drone. I needed more weight lifting capacity and I also needed to keep the multicopter booms out of view of the camera so I moved designed a new multicopter frame from scratch.

I decided to go with a Y6 design which is a hexacopter, it just has 2 motors per boom as opposed to having 6 motors on six booms.  The advantage to this is that there is less weight from the booms themselves, and less arms to get in the way of shooting video and it looks cleaner. The disadvantage to this is loss off efficiency from 15-20% due to the coaxial arrangement of the propellers. I spent some time looking at various hexacopter Y-6 designs I liked, and there’s a lot of variety out there. I saw a lot of cool features I liked and wanted to implement somehow, and some things I liked, but that I didn’t want to copy because they were too unique. I am still working on ways to incorporate the functionality of those features into my multicopter design without copying other people’s designs.

I’ve just upgraded my DIY CNC Router from an air cooled DeWalt DW618 router to one of those popular 2.2kW water cooled Chinese spindles which means I cannow cut fiberglass and not coat the house in tiny little glass fibers of infnite itchiness. The new spindle is show in the photo below.

The Chinese spindle is great so far and I had no problem machining the G-10 / FR4 fiberglass composite. I went with 1.5mm thick material because with the amount of frame plate stacking that I was going to do I felt it would be strong enough. I also made the landing gear out of the 1.5mm black FR4 composite, though 2mm probably would have been better for those since they flex a little bit, but I’ve not had any breakage problems and maybe the flexing absorbs some vibrations while on the ground.

I used Solid Edge 2D, the free edition, to design the parts I needed for the Y-6 multicopter and it worked out very well. All of these drafting and CAD programs have their own little ‘weird’ things you have to be aware of, the biggest problem I had was getting lines to join accurately in the software, but after a bit of work I got used to that and basically just ended up manually connecting line ends.

Once I had the parts drawn up I ran them through CamBam to generate the machining paths and output the g-code for my CNC machine. This is a pretty straight forward process but again you need to spend a little time learning the software and machining terminology. Once you have some experience you can bang out G-code like a nut.

Machining the parts was fun. In order to cut the frame parts I ran the machine at around 400-500mm/min (pretty slow, but the cut depth was almost as wide as the end mill width, and I’ve already broken on 1/16th inch endmill)

The edges turned out very smooth and everything lined up well. It took about 30 minutes to machine these parts with the 4-500mm/min feed-rate and I was really happy with the results.

Once the parts were cut and cleaned off of the holding tape I assembled them into the stacks.

I used 3/4-inch square thin-walled extruded aluminum tubing for the booms, so I knew in advance to order 19mm standoffs to space the plates. I used M3 screws to secure everything together. The middle screw in the battery plate is a counter-sunk screw so it won’t rub against the battery and the middle screw on the upper plate is also counter sunk so I can mount the IMU (inertial measurement unit) to the top of the Y-6 multicopter. Also the standoffs for the legs are 19mm so they’ll fit the 3/4-inch square aluminum booms.

The booms needed to be drilled and mounted which is a bit of fiddly work. It’s important to get the mounting holes in the boom accurate, if they are off center you won’t get them to mount symmetrically into the frame which means slotting and enlarging the holes a bit so you can position them properly.. In the picture below the legs are just taped on, but they’re drilled and mounted now!

After that I drilled holes in the boom to mount the motors top and bottom. I wanted to drill and tap holes on the top and bottom of the boom but the material was just too thin. I was only able to get 2-3 threads worth of threading in and was afraid the motor screws would strip out. I decided to bolt completely through the upper and lower motors with a long bolt and I think this is much more secure as I was able to crank down the bolts nice and tight.

Attaching the Electronics
I attached the electronic components and modules next. Each boom has 2 Turnigy Air 2215j motors and two Turnigy Plush 30A ESCs to control the motor’s speed. There were a LOT of wires that I needed to extend up and down the 3 booms. I added 6″ extensions to the brushless outputs of the ESCs, a total of 18 wires to cut, strip, tin, solder and shrink wrap. All of the power leads for the ESCs also had to be extended 6 inches into the center of the main frame. If you love soldering, you’ll love multicopters! The power leads from all of the ESCs are soldered onto the front and back of a double sided circuit board which has a REAL Deans connector soldered to the top and bottom sides those cheap imitations are an invite to failure and crashes. A power distribution board like this is a very easy way to get power to a lot of things at once.

Updated Photo’s 4/10/2012:

I’ve added some photo’s of my power distribution board. I had to redo the connections when I changed to the larger brushless motors and the positions of the ESCs so it was a good opportunity to do that. The picture below shows the new motor installation and the position of the ESCs on the boom. The ESCs are now in the prop wash since these motors come much closer to the max current rating of the 30 Amp Turnigy Plush ESCs.

Next, all the wires that need to be connected for power distribution to the ESCs. The FC (flight controller) is connected inline with the batteries with it’s own BEC / Voltage regulator so it doesn’t need to be connected to this board.

I soldered the Deans connector onto the small piece of double sided circuit board and then soldered on all of the positive wires.

And then flipped it over and attached the negative leads as well. Each group of leads has it’s own heat shrink which slides up as close to the printed circuit board material as possible. This is to help reduce any chance that friction from vibration or rubbing could cause a positive lead to rub through a negative lead which could lead to a catastrophic short of 2 large Li-Poly batteries and lead to a spectacular lithium polymer explosion or fireball mid flight.

Once I had the leads attached and shrunk the red and black heat-shrink I put a couple of layers of clear heat shrink over the whole board and in the end it looks like this.  It looks huge in the pictures but it’s actually pretty small and not very heavy at all.

End of Updated Photos 4/10/2012

Once I had power to the ESCs I went through each one with the programming card and set the battery type to Ni-XX rather than LiPo. The Ni-XX setting changes the voltage cutoff level to a lower point than you could achieve if you set it for Li-Poly. I also calibrated the throttle range for the speed controllers to my radio, one at a time. A 6 way splitter would allow you to program all 6 at once for the throttle range. Once that was done I removed the red power lead from each ESC connector to disable the BEC(Battery Elimination Circuitry). The DJI WK-M comes with it’s own BEC and if you leave the ones from the ESCs connected it can cause the ESCs to get hot and fight each other.  Here’s a picture of how I disabled the ESC’s built in BEC. After doing this you do need to power the ESC through the main leads, and the BEC through the aux power input to change the programming, so program first to make life easier!

After installing the flight controller (FC) everything was finally assembled as seen in the picture below. There’s quite a few parts involved in a setup like this, which is why I recommend going with something already built to learn the ins and outs of multicopters before you spin your own design but it’s certainly not a requirement.

The overall build went pretty well though this is a bit heavy (Note: Apparently it’s not so bad for the size, most of the weight is in the power system). I thought the arms were heavy, being aluminum so I am going to make another set and use the CNC router to remove a lot of material from them to lighten them up. I will probably also switch to higher power motors in the 300-350 watt range. I put together a video of the work that went into making this so here it is.  Detailed specifications are below the video.

And here’s a video of the first real test flight of my custom Y-6 multicopter design.

Power System
Motors: Turnigy Air 2215j (Rated 900kV (revs per volt) and 200 watts)
Propellers: Gemfan 10×4.5 inch 3 CC, 3 CCW
ESC: Turnigy Plush 30A
Battery: Turnigy Nanontech 4500mAh 25-50C 3S
Thrust per Motor: 820g / 1.8lb
Total (theoretical) thrust: 4920 grams / 10.8lb
Weight Per Motor: 69 grams / 0.15lb
Weight All Motors: 414grams / .912lb

Turnigy Plush ESC Multicopter Config:
Brake – Off
Batt – Ni-xx
Cut Off Type – Soft-Cut
Cut Off Voltage – Low
Start Mode – Normal
Timing Mode – Low
Governor Mode – Off

Frame and Electronics
Flight Controller (FC): DJI WK-M
Frame/Landing Gear: Custom FR4/G10 1.5mm / Garolite (McMaster-Carr)
Booms: 3/4″ Aluminum Extruded Square Tube
Flight Time: 7 Minutes hover time with 1 pack, planning to upgrade to 2 packs
Frame Weight + Electronics: 1990 grams / 3.39lb
Battery Weight: 361 grams / 0.8lb
All Up Weight (AUW): 2351 grams / 5.18lb

Update 3/11/12:

Boom Lightening
I looked into lightening the booms. Each bare boom by itself weighs 130g / 0.29lb without the landing gear.  I made a new boom and drilled it full of holes to lighten it and it only reduced the weight by 30 grams. I can reduce the weight by about 90g / 0.20lb doing this. While it is a worthwhile improvement it’s not a huge improvement. I will eventually do this but I want to focus on adding more power first. Which is the next section. The booms are not a major weight component of this Y-6 most of the weight is in the power system.

Running Turnigy Air 2215J Motors on 4s
The Turnigy Air 2215J motors are rated 200 watts at 3s and to produce about 820g / 1.8lb of thrust each. I built a test stand shown below, using the lightened boom I made, and tested the Turnigy 2215J motor with a 10×4.5″ Gemfan propeller. On a fully charged 3s LiPoly pack (12.6)I was able to produce 960g / 2.12lb of peak  thrust (the 820 number quoted is probably more accurate once you get out of the peak voltage range of the pack). On a fully charged 4s LiPoly pack (16.8v) I was able to get about 1300g / 2.8lb of peak thrust . While that would be a great boost in performance the motor can got scorching hot. I did not try any smaller propellers as I’m not really interested in running smaller props, but I will run a couple of tests tomorrow just out of curiosity to see if the 2215J can run a smaller prop on 4s without melting down.  I did not take any current or power readings, my eagle tree data logger is currently installed in an FPV plane.

The test stand is a simple setup. It’s 9″ from motor center on the right to the middle pivot and 9 inches to the pin on the left pin which pushes against the top of the scale. The weight of the battery causes the lever to rest on the scale and the scale is reset to 0. Power is applied to the motor and the weight on the scale is read as the thrust reading.

Boom Lighting
I was having a hard time with orientation of the Y-6 so on one of the flights the other day I wrapped some yellow rope around one of the landing gear. This helped a lot but I’ve since added a strip of super bright LEDs to the left and right side of the rear boom. This should help for now. I’ve ordered some more advanced lighting strips that I have plans for that should make this a pretty cool looking craft in the evenings!

Update 4/4/2012 – New Motors, New Booms and Some Fun with LED Strips

I’ve received the new motors for the Y-6. The original motors, the Turnigy Air 2215J 900kV (rpm per volt) were rated 200W maximum but they realistically pulled about 160 watts with the 10×4.5 propellers and I was in a marginal zone with the available power. I upgraded the motors to the RC Timer BC3635-11 750kV motors which are rated at 350 watts, and with a 12×4.5 prop I should be getting close to that.

I also switched to new booms. The booms I was using are 0.75″ / 19mm square but a wall thickness of about 0.05″ and weighed about 130g. I believe there was a little flex so I switch to a new material, it’s still 0.75″ / 19mm square aluminum tubing but the walls are much thicker at 0.1″ measured.  The new booms weighed quite a bit more coming in at 230 grams so I programmed a few CNC sequences to lighten them, they now weigh 130g, but the edge walls are much thicker and I think they will have good rigidity mixed with lightness.

Here’s a photo of the new booms. The wall thickness of this new aluminum piece is enough that I can tap and thread the M3 screws straight into the boom. I’m also supports the motors on the opposing sides with 19mm hex standoffs. In the photo some are missing, I’m just waiting for my order from McMaster-Carr for the rest of them.

Upgrades! Y-6 Machined Aluminum Booms and RCTimer BC3635-11 Brushless Motors

On top of the motor and boom upgrades I’ve also been wanting to do some cool lighting. If you’ve seen my other posts, I’ve been wanting to do something cool with addressable LED strips. I covered some of them in my old post on lighting up an R/C helicopter for night flying I ordered 5 meters of RGB strip from China, one set of strips have a ground and 3 inputs, one for red, one for green and one for blue. They work great for general lighting, but not awesome. I ordered a second strip which incorporates RGB LEDs and the LPD6803 controller chips. These were cooler, but you could only control only 3 LEDs at a time.  Where I only have space for 10 LEDs on each boom at this spacing, it wasn’t good enough.

Finally after getting tired of waiting 2 weeks for China shipments I ordered a 1 meter strip of LPD8806 LED strip from Adafruit. THIS is what I was looking for. The LEDs are individually controllable with code and there’s a bit of sample code available out there to work with. I’m not a strong coder so it’s going to take a bit of work to get these things going, hopefully the Adafruit community can help, but if not I’ll just have to force myself to spend 2 weeks of time figuring out their code, which I haven’t assigned for this project, to figure out how to do what I want.

Here’s a video of the LPD8806 strip running the advancedLEDbeltkit sample code. I must admit that while messing with these I had a strong desire to set them up for my Atmolight setup on my monitors, but I need to stick with one project at a time to get them complete!

Here’s a video of the LPD8806 strip running on the advancedLEDbeltkit sample code with an Arduino Duemilanove as the micro-controller.

More updates to come as I get more stuff complete.

Update 4/8/2012 – Initial Test Flights w/New Motors

I just did the first test flights with the new motors and the LED strips. I’m a bit disappointed with the flight time (about 8.5 minutes until the 2 * 4s 4Ah packs reach 3.5v/cell). Never-the-less the thing did look awesome, and it flew very well.  I’m going to post more detailed photos tomorrow but for now here’s a video of the Y-6 with the RCTimer BC3636-11 motors on 12×4.5 * 6 propellers! The lights are LPD8806 LED light strips I bought from Adafruit Industries and the controller is an Arduino Duemilanove running some stock code for the LPD8806 LED strip. I was going to originally use the Arduino Mega 2560 but that’d be quite a waste for this simple project, you could build a whole flight controller with that thing!

Update 4/10/20112 – Accelerometer + Arduino Based LED Strip Lights

I’ve installed an Analog Devices ADXL335 in Adafruit form onto the Arduino to measure acceleration and deceleration in all 3-axis. Right now though I’m only worried about the Z to measure increase and decrease in altitude and how fast.

The measurements are most accurate when the Y-6 is just going straight up and down, and will be less accurate if it’s tilted to the side. I’m still trying to find out if it’s possible to neutralize the pitch and roll out of the Z-axis using the data from the pitch and roll axis’ of the accelerometer, which are the X and Y axis’.

The sensor is rated +/-3g on each axis but actual reads out to 3.6g. It outputs a voltage from min to max(0-3.3v), with a 0g reading being right in the middle. With the Arduino’s analog to digital converters this results in a value from 0-1023 with each step being 0.007g. That exact detail doesn’t matter too much for my use, but good to know.

I used the built-in voltage regulator on the accelerometer board I bought from Adafruit Industries as the external reference for the Arduino A2D converters. It’s important if you do this that you set the analogReference to EXTERNAL in your code before your do an analogRead(pin) from the arduino or you could short the power supplies.  In your setup code just use analogReference(EXTERNAL); and the in the future when you do an analogRead(pin); it will work fine.

I figured I should have some averaging/filtering of the Z-axis input from the accelerometer. While the accelerometer board for Adafruit has some filtering built in it didn’t seem to be enough.

I found some really complex examples but they were a bit much for what I needed and kind of mashed in with other code. I just wanted simple smoothing to keep vibrations from the rig from causing screwy LED effects. The video below shows the test flight without the a2d filtering.

Looking around for ideas I found a line posted by AWOL on the Arduino forums that provides a rolling average over 64 samples. It smooth the accelerometer samples out quite a bit as you can see in the second test video seen below. It was shot in brighter daylight so it’s a bit harder to see, but it should be good enough to tell it the LED strip transitions between the speeds more smoothly.

The source code is still the advancedLEDbeltkit demo code, I’ve just heavily modified it and removed the effects and fade modes that I wasn’t using it and inserted the A2D code and some other minor tweaks. My biggest issue is that the changed between scan speeds are not smooth but I hope to find a way to resolve that out soon and be making some more nifty light art using the timed shutter on my camera.

The spindle is one of the many available on eBay in the 2.2KW range. Shipped from China it looks to be in great condition and uses ER20 collets. It was good to see that the collet nut had been drilled for balance in several places. It doesn’t look pretty but I’ll take balance over pretty any day.  The motor itself is fairly heavy, I’ll probably have to use a spring or gas assist/counter-weight on the Z-axis to help support the weight.  I don’t have a readily available air supply so I’m going to look at spring or gas struts that are adjustable to help support the weight.

The spindle is water cooled but I’ve done water cooled lasers and computers before so that part won’t be too difficult to setup.  I ordered the VFD (Variable Frequency Drive) from another company and hopefully that will be arriving soon as well.

One of my main reasons for upgrading is that I accidentally set to high of a feed rate when cutting some aluminum and while the lights dimmed(!) the router still cut the piece with relative accuracy. I knew then that with a higher power spindle I’d be able to do some nice aluminum machining at a reasonable speed.

Here’s a picture of the spindle next to a lighter.

It’s amazing they can cram 2.2kW into such a small unit!  Here’s a picture of the spindle end where you can see the drilled holes in the collet nut for balancing(of the collet nut).

Okay, I was just playing around with the lighter pic.  Here’s a photo of the spindle with a real lighter somewhere in the picture.

On a side note the big lighter is almost a perfect replica of a smaller lighter, I imagine I will be focusing on much smaller projects in the future. Then I can build big, throw the lighter next to the item and make them look super tiny!

Update: The Huanyang VFD (Variable Frequency Drive) came in last week and I just got it up and running today with the 2.2kw water cooled chinese spindle. I used a 10k potentiometer / 10k pot / 10k variable resistor I had handy, which was built into a joystick from something I took apart a couple years ago. I had to fiddle with the PD settings a bit to get this to work right, and make sure that the jumper on the VFD was set to VI in order for it to respond to the commands from the potentiometer and change speed.

I also found an old water pump, a Laing DD12V-D5, that I used when I was water cooling my computer.  Here’s the work list for this project.

1) Remove the DeWalt DW618 handheld router and the current SSR on/off setup I use.
2) Order and install K2 CNC mount to my Z-Axis using a spindle mount such as K2 or FineLine Automation sell.
3) Run water cooling lines and new wire for the new spindle in the cable chain. (3 wire+shield)
4) Install a 220V outlet for the VFD from the electrical box
5) Mount the VFD under the table and connect it to the Gecko 540 automation controller.

I’ll post more updates to this post specifically as things move along.

Update: I got the spindle and the VFD installed and running with Mach 3. It took a little bit of work but there’s so much help out there if you search for the common terms such as “chinese spindle mach3′  ‘chinese spindle <your controller type> ‘, etc. Every controller is a bit different, but with all the resources out there I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out a way to hook one of these up. There’s a lot of settings in the VFD controllers which need to be set right to get the speed and proper RPM readings out of the spindle but they’re all very well documented online as well.

I ended up using a 5 gallon bucket to hold the water for the spindle.  My pump is not submersible so I have a hole drilled in the side of the bucket with a fitting and a line to feed the DD12V-D5 pump.  I ordered some paired tubing from McMaster but the wall was too thick. I ended up going to Lowes and buying water line there from the plumbing department to get things working out alright. Take your spindle and test some hoses, you’ll find a couple of options.

The mount was a bit more work, I had put off ordering a mount because I didn’t really want to spend 80 bucks on one, and my friend Ollie told me he’d help me out if I ordered the materials.  We ended up going with one he designed himself, much more basic than my design, but also more sturdy.  He ran the parts on his CNC converted mill and they came out super clean. I could have run them on my machine with the DeWalt router but I doubt they could have come out as clean without a lot of sanding.

Here’s a picture of the mounts he made.

He also machined some mounting holes in my back plate for the mount and when I got home I mounted everything up. Here’s the end result.

This 2.2kW spindle runs great and I’d be willing to answer any questions about my setup or provide more pictures, just ask using the comment form below and I’ll get back to you.  Here’s a shot of it cutting some FR4 1.5mm material with a 1/16th inch end mill in one pass.

Since this was for a time-lapse video it totally messed with the video causing lots of flickering.  I use a registered version of Apple QuickTime to assemble the still images into a video, it works really well.

I contacted GoPro and they said this is a known problem with the firmware that the camera shipped with and to install the Cineform software, then plug the camera into the USB port, turn the camera on, then start Cineform and it would offer to update the camera with the latest firmware.  Problem solved so far, I haven’t seen this issue again.

With that problem solved I once again love this camera!

The GoPro camera will be great for my FPV flying. It will shoot full 1080p video while I fly through the video goggles.  Unfortunately I won’t have HD visuals in the headset, but I’ll be able to record the flights and hopefully some great scenery in the spring and summer.

Anyways with flying season coming to an end and Winter finally starting to poke it’s head out I did manage to get a couple of videos with the GoPro mounted onto some aircraft.

This first video is the GoPro mounted to my flying buddies Outrage Fusion 50 electric helicopter running 12S.  The camera sat sideways so the video is sideways. I didn’t have a mount handy to hold it right side up as I still need to get some more mounting accessories so I apologize in advance for the ‘I don’t know how to hold my iPhone when shooting video’ look but the video still turned out cool.

These videos are best watched in full screen at 720 or 1080 resolution setting (bottom right hand corner of the video windows, click where it says 360 and select a higher resolution)

(Note: I’ve replace the original video with this much better video. We shot a second one this weekend with the camera in the right direction and it’s a big improvement.)

For the second video I mounted the GoPro on my Twist 60, it was sprinkling a little bit so there are some water spots here and there. This is the first time I flew the Twist after I lost 2 4s packs while doing a snap roll and the plane fell to the ground.  The video is pretty long so feel free to fast forward or randomly poke about the timeline. To attach the camera I just used one of the flat mounts on the forward fuselage. I did run a piece of string from the camera housing to the landing gear, just in case the mount broke free.

Another cool feature of the GoPro Hero cameras is that they are able to do time lapse photography. On the Hero 2 you can have it take photos anywhere from every 0.5 seconds to every 60 seconds.  Here’s a video I recorded out the window at work one day just as a sample. I believe this was one picture every 2 seconds for 46 minutes. (I have a wimpy 4gb SD card that only holds about 1400 frames.. That card just quit working for me today so hopefully I can get a hold of a nice 32GB one soon!)

Hopefully I can get out on the weekend during the day and shoot some nice time lapse stuff off a tripod with no window reflections. I’m also going to mess around with the slow motion recording the Hero 2 offers. You can shoot 120 frames per second which is about 1/4 real time when played back at 30FPS so some neat effects might be possible with that too!

While the temperatures are pretty low these days I don’t do much flying and mostly do indoor stuff.  Since the rest of the house aside from the living room is at like 40-45 degrees I’m not doing much of the CNC stuff either, but sticking to the living room that’s warmed by the electronics and computers so I’m not sure what kind of updates I might post here this winter, but I have a few ideas in mind.

Happy New Years!

Update: 1/7/2012

I shot some more videos with the GoPro.  I shot a new heli video for my friend with the camera sitting the right way for some real high quality HD viewing enjoyment.  I also shot a couple more fun videos of the Twist 60.  I’ve placed the new heli video up at the top of this post to replace the original cruddy one. This again is my friend’s Outrage Fusion 50.  He’s running 12S with a Hextronix speed controller, scorpion motor, high voltage servos and a a Skookum 720 flybarless controller.

Below is the second video I shot of my Brushless Twist 60 EP.  The specs are all over this site if you do a search for ‘Twist 60′ in the bar above. This video is with the camera mounted backwards and it looks pretty neat.

And in this last video I almost wrecked the Twist. I cut out a lot of the excess video footage so this video is relatively short compared to most things I capture. It gets pretty exciting when I have my near wreck but fortunately I only flattened the landing gear a little bit and was able to bend the stamped aluminum struts back into their proper position and the GoPro was no more worse for the wear either.

With winter on the way I needed to find out where my house was insulated and where it wasn’t. Since it’s an old house with quite a few previous owners I had no idea what had been insulated or what had not been insulated. I ended up renting a FLIR (Forward Looking InfraRed) camera from Ajax Environmental in Texas. They ship priority and you have to ship it back priority so expect to spend a lot on shipping. It wasn’t a cheap rental but it provided me with a lot of good and somewhat depressing information about my old house. I’ve heard that some fire departments or county/town energy departments will loan thermal cameras in some circumstances so this may be worth checking into before spending any money.

While I took a lot of pictures of the house I’m going to put those on my House Blog later this weekend. While I had the camera I took a lot of photos of random things around the house, so I’ll just get to the meat here and show you the photos with descriptions. There are quite a few photos here and I hope you enjoy them. The images from this camera are pretty small, so clicking on them might make them a little bigger, but not much.

Above: Self Powered USB Hub. You can see the heat from the voltage regulator on the left hand side. The white areas are 108 degrees, with the darker cooler blues being around 74. The stick in one of the ports is my wireless headphone adapter which seems to generate a bit of heat itself.

Above: These are the raid drives in my computer. While they look hot, the thermal image is relative. White can mean 100 degrees or 300 degrees, depending on what’s in the image. In this case the hottest point is 116 degrees on the bottom hard drive with the top hard drive being a bit cooler. This is no surprise as the top hard drive is directly behind the front case fan. With the plastic clips this case uses to hold hard drives, there’s not very good thermal transfer to the hard drive bracket itself to dissipate heat.

Above: This is my computer’s motherboard. It’s an ASUS motherboard with an i7 quad core processor and triple channel memory. White is representing about 149 degrees. You can see three chips on the board which are pretty warm. The white spot on the bottom right is the BIOS chip. The curved piece you see is a metal heat pipe. In most cases metal acts as a mirror to infrared energy and reflects it’s surrounding. Even unpolished metal will reflect heat like a mirror. It’s pretty amazing. The three cooler piece at the top are the memory modules.

Above: This is the stock Intel cooler for my quad core i7 processor. The metal of the heatsink will reflect what’s in front of it, but it does run pretty cool. This is running with a moderate load. You can see a spot of heat in the center of the fan which is probably from the driver electronics. All of the fans in the case had this hot warm center point.

Above: Here’s a thermographic photo of 3 of our Dell servers at the office. The bottom one has 5 drives the middle one has 2 and the top one only has one. You can see the grill pattern inside of the case on top. These are front air intake, rear exhaust rack mount cases so you can see the hard drives on the left side of the case maintain quite a bit of heat. The power supply sits behind these drives and blocks airflow a little bit more than the rest of the hard drives.

Above: Back to my home computer you can see the heat emitted from the main CPU voltage regulator at about the middle of the picture. Above the circular fin arrangement of the CPU cooler you can see the thermal outline of the heatsink for the voltage regulator FETs.

Above: You can see a couple of voltage regulators in this photo as well. They sit in between a couple of the PCI Express slots. The dark colored dots on the board are the capacitors, fortunately they’re all running cool so nothing failing there thermally anyways.

Above: Here’s a better shot of the DIMMs on my motherboard. It’s a triple channel setup and you can barely make out the top of the fins which look like little squares. The memory modules have aluminum heatsinks which will reflect their environment, which in this case is cooler. If you shoot at an off angle you can reduce this reflection a large amount.

Above: A wide shot of the side of my computer case. You can see the little warm spots on each of the fans, and the white paint that says “Raid Max // Dirk-Tooth” emits thermal radiation, and the reflection of the surrounding metal and shows a cool blue. The rest of the metal is anodized black which seems to cut the reflection quite a bit as well.

Above: This is the thermal image looking at the front of my case. The top bay houses my DVD/RW drive and you can see some heat build up there. White is representing 95 degrees in this photo. Below that drive you can see the drive bay blanks, and you can actually tell where the thickness of the material varies.

Above: This is the side of the case with the cover back on. You can see cooler spots at the right side of the acrylic, the blue line is a large vent and then you can see where the air is drawn through the case. The two holes on the left are intake and exhaust fans.

Above: This is my entertainment center. The box at the top is the cable TV box. On the right side middle is the Nintendo Wii and on the bottom is a wall wart power adapeter. On the left side top is the Cable modem, and below that is a power strip with a wall wart power transformer plugged into it. Barely visible below the cable box is a stereo tuner.

Above: This is the engine compartment of a Honda Accord just after being run. As you can see the temps in here are pretty high. You can make out the ignition wiring at the bottom and some cables at the top of the photo.

Above: Here’s a thermal photo of a recently used disc brake. I took pictures of both sides of the vehicle to see if one side was hotter than the other, possibly indicating that one brake caliper was working harder/hotter than the other, but they both measured out about the same.

Above: And here’s a photo of a drum style brake. You can see the reflections of my legs in the metal trim around the outside of the rim. The drum is the bright colored spot, and it’s quite a bit cooler than the front rotors. I might pull these off to make sure the adjusters are working and the pads are good, but drums just might run cooler since they have more thermal mass to them.

Above: This is a particularly interesting photo of my trucks engine compartment. You can see the heat abruptly cuts off at the front panel where it meets the door. you can see the heat from a tree reflecting off the windshield of the truck and also off of the hood of the truck.

Above: Here’s a close-up shot of an exhaust manifold on a 4-cylinder engine. The thermal camera measures the temperature at the hot spots as high as 302 degrees or higher. I’m not sure if 302 degrees is the limit of the sensor as exhaust manifolds can get extremely hot. You can also make out the spark plug wires on the left and right hand side.

Above: Moving into the house now. This is a wall wart power transformer used to charge the car jump-box seen on the right. You can see the wall box has picked up a little heat, but there’s some cold air coming in under the door.

Above: Thermal image of a Keurig K-Cup coffee maker shortly after use. These coffee makers are great, and they make tea and cocoa and other things too. I’d love to get one for the house as I usually don’t wake up early enough to wait for a whole pot to brew (and wouldn’t drink a whole pot anyways).

Above: These are the ends of fluorescent light tubes. While both tubes are dark in the fixture the tube on the right has a thermal signature from the working filament. The filament in the tube on the left is burned out and therefore the fixture isn’t igniting. At the other end of the tubes both filaments are lit. Once I could see which filament was shot I tapped on the tube which knocked the filament pieces into contact with each other long enough to ignite the lamp and had a working fixture the rest of the day.

Above: Here’s another shot of the thermal radiation from a non-lit fluorescent tube with a working filament. You can see the letting ‘H.O.’ (high output) printed on the tube just above the the black box because it actually is hotter than the glass envelope itself.

Above: This is cold water coming out of my kitchen sink as seen by the thermal camera. The picture below shows hot.

Above: Once the water heated up I took another photo. It’s amazing how the water becomes dynamic. If you ever get access to a thermal camera I highly suggest checking this out. It’s a very nice fade effect.

Above: I mentioned that metal acts as a reflector for thermal energy. Glass does as well within a certain angle. If you’re shooting dead on like I did in this photo it makes a great reflector. You can see me reflected in this narrow window holding the infrared camera and behind me the cooler back part of the house showing in deep blue. Make a not that this is only a 10 degree F temperature difference from white(hot) to deep blue(cold).

Above: This photo was taken at a friends house. This cool wall surrounds an unused chimney. I put my hand against the wall for just a few seconds and was then able to take a thermographic photo of the hand print. The prints actually will stay visible for a fair amount of time. You can also see footprints on cool floors and carpets.

Above: This is a thermal picture of one of the LED displays I work with at work. The display is about 3 foot tall by 5 foot wide. You can see how the heat builds up on the actuall LED panels themselves from the LEDs running. At the bottom center of the cabinet is air intake fan which provides cooling and on the sides are power supply boards which generate a bit of heat and add to the warmth in the cabinet.

That’s all of the non-insulation/house photos I took with this FLIR B50 Thermal Imaging camera that turned out well. I hope you enjoyed looking through them. I’m sure I wasn’t able to take full advantage of this camera as there’s quite a few different options. I might have needed another week or so of playing with it to get everything down really good. The manual was good and informative though. If you have any questions about how/why I shot things or what not feel free to provide your input below.

I captured most of his flight on the recorder, but the video format is a bit weird and landing got cut off.  Just keep in mind this is someone who’s never flown First Person View before, aside from maybe a flight simulator.

On Sunday I went to my local field and let some of those guys check out some of the video as I flew as well and they all thought it was cool it seems. My friend Al who flies giant scale planes is there so I asked him if I could fly around him while he was flying his big plane, he had no problems with that so I got some fun video of his 30% plane flying around while I glided around.

I pushed the height envelope on an earlier flight than the one above and got up to 1000 feet. I’m sure I could get much higher with the equipment but not at this location that’s for sure. You can see the Hudson River, the Thruway and the Catskill mountains quite well from this video.

I wish the video quality on my FPV recorder was a bit better. I’m using an Aiptek DZO-V50 which is one of the few recorders I could find that would record through interference but it compresses the video quite badly. Then the video gets compressed again when I upload it to YouTube. I’d like to switch to a GoPro HD HERO camera so I could record HD video while doing my FPV flights and hopefully get some great high rez scenery shots as well.

That’s it for the FPV stuff for now, I need to go drag all the bins and boxes and planes out of my truck from the weekend and get ready for another fun-filled work week.

The digital microscope I bought is shaped like a bullet, plugs into a USB port and has a built in LED light ring. There is a silver focus adjustment knob on the unit which moves the camera up and down towards the open end of the unit. To focus the camera you adjust the knob and find the sweet spot. There are two sweet spots and their position varies depending on how close you have the camera to the object.  For extreme close-up shots I just set the camera right on the table over the item I want to zoom in on and adjust.

The knob for focus is a bit fiddly to adjust, it can stick at points and takes a fair amount of pressure to turn which as a result makes it hard to focus precisely. I’ll probably tear this apart and see if it’s possible to improve the sliding action. The stand is satisfactory, but it it would be better if the digital microscope had a hard mount of some sort. The plastic is too flexible and the microscope can move around when you’re trying to focus it.

The software for this Digital Microscope is called MonitorPad and also comes with a Micro-Measure app that once calibrated you can use to measure things on the video feed. The software works okay, but if you install it on Windows 7 with a full privileged user you need to run it as admin in order to be able to save files. If you change permissions on the program files directory this should fix that.

That said, for 40 bucks it actually does a pretty good job at what I wanted it to do. It’s pretty amazing how close in it gets to small objects.

In the first set of photos below the first photo was taken with my Nexus One, and the other 2 were taken with the Digital Microscope. Once you get really zoomed in you loose depth-of-field and anything just slightly above or below what you’re focused on will be out of focus.

Click Pics for Full Size

These next shots are of a 39 ohm 0805 surface mount resistor. That’s 0.8mm x 0.5mm in size which makes the marks on the scale behind it 0.5mm each.

The next photos of are a RGB through-hole LED chip that I was messing around with. These are actually really nice chips and breadboard mountable for experimenting with PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) on micro-controllers for color mixing and color fading. They’re bright, low profile and easy to connect.

While playing with the microscope I also took close up pictures of 3 different surface mount LEDs. The big one is a 1206 size (1.2mm x 0.6mm) the mid-sized LED is an 0805 size package (0.8mm x 0.5mm) and the small one is an 0603 package (0.6mm x 0.3mm) (TINY!) The blue glow is the lights from the digital microscope, they threw off the color balance of the Nexus One camera but in real life there’s not so much blue.

And here are some other photos I shot of a blue 0805 surface mount LED. The details on this one turned out pretty good the bonding wires are so tiny.

I also got some photos of my Arduino Mega 2560. You can  see me zoom into one of the vias (plated pass through holes) with the microscope in the following photo set.

Another thing I thought would be fun to get a close-up of is a razor blade. This blade is the large snap off kind a bit over an inch wide. The first photo shows the edge of the razor blade. If you look close in the first picture you can see the ground end, and then at the top the sharpened edge.  The second photo shows just the sharpened edge portion.  This is a mildly used razor blade so you can see some corrosion and dings in the edge of the blade, although even a brand new blade doesn’t look much cleaner.

And finally a close-up of the pixels on my Nexus One oLED display. The red pixels over-exposed so they appear as yellow, but you can see the unique shape of the the different pixel colors to provide proper color balance on the display. I wasn’t able to get the digital microscope to zoom in ultra close because the glass cover/touchscreen on the phone keeps the camera from getting close enough to the screen  to focus properly.

I still have to get used to looking at the screen while trying to manipulate objects under the digital microscope, it’s a weird feeling, but hopefully soon I’ll be able to move around and solder these small components I’m going to be working with.

I had a glitch on my Airtronics and wrecked the Mini-Titan unfortunately. I had built some night blades for it but I wasn’t able to fly them at NEAT. I did find someone to fly them for me though and they were kind enough to try them out and let me get some photos. They’re near the end of the night-fly photos.

If you weren’t able to make it to NEAT Fair 2011, I highly recommend trying to attend NEAT Fair 2012 next year. Please enjoy the photographs!

If you weren’t able to make it to the NEAT fair 2010, I took a lot of photos then as well. Last years NEAT Fair photos.

Click on the photos to see a bigger version. Click the small left and right arrows on the bottom of a big image to move forward or backward through the images in high resolution.

At the time that was a pretty advanced concept for night blades, though most night blades had multiple LEDs on them, I was more after proving the concept.  The concept worked okay but the timing of the color changes was based on the predicted governor RPM speed of the blades. This resulted in the colors blurring and the colors not staying in their sectors on the rotor disc. The night skids were fun as well, but they suffered from exposure to the exhaust of the heli and eventually crazed and cracked.  A 2-part clear coat system could have solved this problem but I didn’t know that at the time.

Fast forward 8 years to 2011. I am putting together plans to design some new electronics for night flying. I think I’ve learned quite a bit in the last few years so I believe it will be a fun project. If you saw my previous post on lighting the mini-titan you saw my discussion of a lot of LED strips which are available. Those will get used for the main fuse, but the blade electronics and lighting is going to be a scratch built project. This page will be updated as the project progresses so you can bookmark it and come back to see the latest information and details.

Some of the features which will definitely be in play with the new design.

• Synchronization of the LED patterns will be triggered with an infrared LED mounted to the frame of the helicopter. Each time a rotor blade passes over the infrared LED the micro-controller on the blades will pick up the pulse. This way the micro-controller will be able to adjust the timing of the display as the blade RPMs shift and change. With the rotors spinning at 2000 RPM there is a lot of sampling data available and it should be able to quickly track RPM changes.
• Li-Poly batteries.  When I built the original electronics in 2003 Li-Poly batteries weren’t common place and were expensive. In 2011 I can buy a 3.7 volt 100mAh Li-Poly battery for 50 cents a piece.
• Controllable on and off via the R/C transmitter. The micro-controller can be programmed to turn the night blades on and off depending on if the infrared emitter on the frame of the helicopter is on or off.  When the rotors are running the micro-controller will receive a constant stream of pulses from the infrared sensor on the blades. If the signal stops for x amount of milli-seconds, the controller can turn the rotor blade LEDs off.
• Manual power switch and charging jack. My old blades used disposable button cells. With the new setup being Li-Poly and rechargable I’m going to add a charging jack and a micro-switch for the main power. Charging will just be done through a 2s balance connector.
• I’m building this project on a 450 sized heli so it should scale up easily to larger sizes.

For now I’ve ordered up a bunch of surface mount LEDs, surface mount resistors, some copper tape and a bunch of batteries and other things. The dark is coming sooner and sooner this time of year so I’m going to whip up a set of simple night blades so I can fly a little later in the evenings hopefully and I’ll be working on the advanced night blade project as one of my Fall/Winter projects.

9/13/2011 – Development Tools

With some LEDs and other items on order I was eager to get setup to make some regular night blades, but I’m more excited to make some computerized night-blades.  I cleaned off the desk top and got my development tools out and at the ready as seen in the picture below.

On the far left is the Atmel STK-500 AVR development board, then next to that, above is an Ethernet shield for my Arduino Duemilanove, below the Ethernet shield is my adapter for the 8 pin SOIC surface mount form factor and to it’s right is a row of ATtiny 12s in their plastic holder. In the next row top is the Arduino Duemilanove and below it is the Arduino Mega 2560, a beautiful board. To the right of that is one of my development breadboards and some jumper wires.

I’ll probably start with the ATtiny12s to run blades which have 2-3 LEDs per blade and for picking up the IR emitter on the boom (used to calculate RPM for visual effects and to let the blades know to light when spinning) and if I decide to go more complex I can use the Mega 2560.  The ATtiny12L-4 chips that I have will run on 2.7 to 5.5 volts which makes them suitable to run on the 3.7v Li-Poly cells I plan on using on the night blades. Additionally it has a power down current of <1 uA and when active at 4Mhz/3V it consumes just 2.2mA.

The Ardunio Mega 2560 is a tantalizing subject for more advanced project experimentation because it has 54 digital inputs and outputs with 14 of them being Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) channels if desired. The ATMega2560 would be a difficult chip to hand solder into a night blade, but it could be assembled with many LEDs on a piece of flexible circuit board and SMD soldering techniques to build a very powerful POV night blade system.

I’ve ordered a 10x magnifying headset to help with soldering the small LEDs and I’ve also ordered up a 400x USB microscope to check out solder joints and other random things.

9/18/2011 – First Set of Night Blades and NEAT Fair 2011

My first set of LEDs and resistors I ordered from Digikey showed up on the 14th as did the spools of 5mm copper tape I ordered from Sparkfun. So I got busy building night blades using the technique posted on the HeliFreak forums. It took a couple of hours over a couple of evenings to make the first set using this method, I’m sure it’d go faster to make subsequent blades.

I took some closeup shots of the resistors and diodes to give some example of their size. They can be pretty small. I used 2x magnifying headset for some of the work though I probably could have done it without, it did make things easier.

Here’s the pictures of a red LED.

The resistors are about the same size as the LED in the first picture above. Here’s a closeup view so you can see where the conductive pads on the end are located and what they look like. These are the parts that need to be soldered end to end.

And this is the copper tape I used to make the traces on the blades. It’s self adhesive backed so you just press it onto the blades and then press it firmly into the blade with a fingernail or some else smooth that won’t tear the copper foil. 5mm is a bit wide for this kind of work so I used a very sharp razor blade to split it into smaller pieces. You can get 2-3 strips from 1 piece of copper length if you’re careful with the cuts.  It’s very hard to get perfectly shaped pieces, and unfortunately it’s next to impossible to find a supplier of thinner copper tapes.

Here are the complete helicopter night blades I made, you can see the copper traces and the where I soldered them where they joined. I then used thin CA on the edges of the tape to help secure it to the blades. The batteries are little ones from an MSR helicopter, 3.7v at 120mAh. I soldered the tabs directly to the circuit traces and use a 3-pin connector to turn them on and also for charging. The next set I make I am just going to use the tiny battery connector and a proper lead, it will be much cleaner and easier to use.

One important thing to make note of is that the edges of carbon fiber blades are conductive, in order to make carbon fiber night blades you need to insulate the edges before you put the copper foil over the edge. I used clear nail polish and brushed it on over the edges of the blade, but only in the spots where the copper was wrapping around the night blade. Coating the hole edge would add more weight and is not neccesary. I originally only had 2 LEDs per blade and the tested current draw was 37 milli-amps (.037 Amps). The LEDs are rated at about 20mA a piece so the current draw was well within usable range and I could see that there were no shorts causing excessive current draw.

After adding 1 additional LED to each night blade, for a total of three per blade things were looking pretty good. Here’s a picture of the blades top and bottom. You can see some hazing on the surface of the blades, this is caused by the thin CA I used, and can be removed with a little work.

And here’s a photo of the LED night blades before I added the red and white LEDs (red on bottom, white on top) to help identify the tops and bottoms of the rotor disc.

I was going to fly the blades at the NEAT fair 2011 but I had a lockout on my Airtronics radio for some reason and did some minor damage to the helicopter. I saw someone else down there flying a 450 with LEDs on the frames but he didn’t have lighted rotor blades so I offered to loan his mine. He’d get to see his heli with night blades and I’d get to see the night blades on a heli at NEAT. Good deal!

I already have some ideas for changing the layout of the LEDs, but since the next pair will be driven by a micro-controller for some POV rotor blade games those plans may change as well. I think the next pair the outer LEDs will be closer to the outer edge of the rotor blades, and perhaps there will be several LEDs in each position, side by side to make for wider bands of light.  The night blades were very visible though a bit dimmer than the main LEDs on the body of the helicopter. I have some much brighter LEDs on the way from a Chinese company.

More updates to come, thanks for reading and boomark this page and check back later to see what else I’m doing with LED Night Blades.