Stupid Mistakes

It was a nice day and I was flying from my backyard while the kids’ were playing on their trampoline. I’d just started my fourth pack and was flying around the front of the house when my nose started to itch. What I should have done was landed to take care of it, but what I actually did was try fly one-handed and take care of it. I believe the words “real quick” passed through my mind. I ended up with me drifting into the side of the house, bouncing off, and crashing.

I knew I was in for some problems though because right after that the feed to my goggles went blue. I’ve never had that happen before. That can only be bad though.

Static usually means that the VTX is dead. A black screen with the on screen display means there’s a problem with the camera. But a blue screen was new to me, so I wasn’t sure what the problem was.

I tried unplugging the battery and plugging it back in, but got the same blue screen in my goggles. Taking off the canopy, I didn’t see any damage to the wires from the flight controller to the video transmitter or from the VTX to the camera. I tried the battery again with the canopy off and didn’t see any difference. Taking the VTX out of the canopy didn’t help either. I accidentally notice that if I squeezed the VTX between my thumb and index finger the picture would pop back in briefly. So I started looking more closely at the board and finally figured out the problem.

The red arrow is pointing to a tiny brown and silver rectangle. That’s a capacitor. Here’s a closer photo.

Another one with tweezers included for scale.

So the crash had knocked that capacitor partly loose. Whatever it’s purpose it was allowing the VTX to transmit enough that my goggles were picking up a signal but not actually sending any OSD or the camera image. It was also far, far too small for me to try to resolder. I did try to put some liquid tape over the area, thinking that might hold it in place, but it was so small that just putting that on the board moved the capacitor.

I’ve really had a hard time with this A01 VTX. More so than anything else that came on the HX100 originally. But I’m not sure I can blame this one anything other the me being stupid and having to bad luck to crash into a landscaping timber. Regardless of the cause though I was ready to try something else.

I’d never been a fan of the soldered on antenna connection for one, especially since it came with a dipole antenna and I used left-hand circular polarized antennas on my goggles and my whoops. So this was a change to upgrade the VTX antenna as well as the VTX itself.

I’d been pretty happy with the Eachine Nano that I’d used in my brushless whoop build, and had bought a second one as a spare, so I decided to use that as a replacement. The trick was figuring out how I was going to mount it in the quad since it’s rectangular shaped and wouldn’t mount in the canopy in the same way. I also didn’t want to try to stick it to the flight controller with double-sided tape. After a bit of fiddling around trying to decide how to mount it I had the idea to strip all of the components off of the old A01 VTX board, mount it in the canopy, and then stick the new VTX to it.

I had to rewire things a bit since the new VTX didn’t have a camera passthrough on it like the original one. So I could run the 5V and ground from the VTX to the camera, but had to splice in a new wire from the camera to the flight controller (the yellow to blue signal wire below).

Once the new wiring was figured out, I just had to solder everything back onto the flight controller, which by this point is pretty routine for me. Plugged in a battery to test that I could see a picture in my goggles and that I was able to change the VTX band, channel, and power from the OSD. Then I put heat shrink on the VTX to both isolate it electrically from the old VTX I was going to mount it to and also to hold the antenna on. This board uses a UF.L connector which is very light but isn’t the most secure, so I like to have the heat shrink on it to help make sure it doesn’t go anywhere.

That did require an update to my canopy mod though, since the new antenna wouldn’t fit through the old hole that I’d drilled. So I clipped the end just a bit to allow the antenna to slip through. I debated drilling a hole through the end that I could zip-tie shut, but so far it’s seemed pretty secure without it.

So now I have a further modified HX100. I think at this point maybe one or two motors, the canopy, and the camera are the only original parts. Most of the problems I’ve had with it have been due to crashes and my own stupid mistakes. It’s definitely been my favorite quadcopter to fly.

Crashes and Quad Repair

In quad versus pole, the pole always wins.

It was decent weather over the weekend for Indiana in December, meaning that it wasn’t completely overcast, windy, and miserable. It was still cold, somewhere in the mid 30’s, but I didn’t want to pass up no wind and a little bit of sun for getting some outside flying in. I charged up half a dozen 2S batteries for my toothpick quad, and a couple of batteries for my boys’ RC cars, and we headed over to their elementary school which is only five minutes away.

I got the boys’ cars setup and they went off to do donuts and ramp off of the playground equipment, while I fired up my radio and goggles and put the first battery in.

It was a little rough getting started. I’m going to blame it on adjusting to the cold. I don’t wear gloves when I fly. I’ve tried it a couple of times and it just messes with my muscle memory too much, even with a thin pair. I had a couple of near misses with trees and playground equipment at first, but by the end of the first battery I was feeling pretty good.

Flying at the school is nice for a couple of reasons. There’s the obvious one that it’s a bigger space with a nice large parking lot so I can keep the throttle more open and really get some speed up as I fly around. There’s also a lot more stuff to play with too. There’s light poles, trees, and playground equipment to fly around and over and through. So it makes it a lot more fun to do proximity flying than what I can do when I go down to the field near my home to fly where I do more loops, flips, and rolls since there aren’t many obstacles.

The second battery started out much better than the first as I was getting familiarized with the space. I made a couple of passes through the playground. I played around with following Thing One’s RC truck as he drove around a couple of trees, and then I took off to make a big looping pass through the playground. I misjudged my line through the obstacles though and pinged of a metal pole. It was a hard hit too as it was enough to cause the flight controller to reboot. I wasn’t worried though, I’ve had hard crashes before with my HX100 and it’s rarely had a problem.

Once the FC came back up, I armed it and tried to take off, but the quad just spun a bit and wouldn’t take off. I disarmed again and took off my goggles and put my radio down to head over. I figured there was some mulch from the playground stuck in a motor or maybe on of the receiver antennas got twisted and was blocking a prop. Both of those things have happened before in a crash, which usually takes a couple of seconds to fix and then I’m back in the air again. This time it was a bit more severe.

This is actually the second time I’ve broken a motor. The last time was in October, so I’m averaging one motor every two months. The October break was some a head-on crash into a heavy tree branch that broke the front right motor. Somehow this time I broke the right rear one. I can’t tell from the video playback, but I must have yawed a little as I hit the pole. It was a pretty hard hit too. I noticed when I got home and inspected the damage that I bent the motor bell and damaged some of the magnets.

I’m not sure if it was just a hard hit against a metal pole, or if the cold had anything to do with it. I feel like I’ve had some equally hard crashes flying my yard, but those collisions usually involve tree branches or wooden fences and not heavy duty playground equipment.

So that put an early end to my flying for the day. It was cold enough out though that my boys didn’t last much longer than that anyway, so I probably wouldn’t have gotten more than another battery in anyway. Just now I have to replace the motor.

It’s not hard to do since I’m using plugs and not direct soldering the motors to the flight controller, it just requires more disassembly than I want to do. I do have to take the canopy off and take the flight controller out because of the tight space that the motor wires and plug run through. I think the last time I did it, it took me a bit more than 20 minutes to do. At least I already have the parts, since these 1103 motors come in sets of four instead of being sold individually, and they’re interchangeable so I don’t need a specific motor at each position.

To be honest, I need to take it apart and do some work on it anyway. The antenna has had a couple of prop strikes on it, and I need to either switch back to some shorter tri-blade props that can’t reach the antenna, or make a change to the canopy so that the antenna stays above the props. I have an idea to drill a small hole through the back of the canopy a few millimeters above where the antenna currently sits so I can feed the antenna out at an angle. That way the canopy itself will keep the antenna from getting down into where the props can hit it.

Finding a Lost Quad

It was the first trip to the in-law’s farm after getting my HX100, and I was looking forward to trying it out where I had lots of open space. I’d already had a good set of flights with my Acrobrat flying all of the packs I had, before switching over to my HX100 and having fun with that one.

On my last pack for the HX100, I decided to see how far it could go given the lower power VTX, and flew it out to the edge of the empty field I was using.

You can see the line of darker green between the treeline to the right and the stand of trees left of center.

I got all of the way out to the stand of trees and backed to fly along the edge of the corn field next to the empty field I’d been flying over. The video signal was having a little bit of an issue but so bad that I couldn’t fly it. Still I didn’t want to push my luck further and possibly lose it in the corn field, so I turned back towards where I was flying from.

Looking back towards where I was standing, along the edge of the green field towards the right quarter of the picture.

Only a few seconds after turning back it failsafed and crashed. The impact tilted the camera up so the top half of the view was the inside of the canopy and the rest was some plants.

Totally not realizing some of the limitations of the receiver on the HX100 versus the one on my Acrobrat, I headed out into the field with the range check on my radio turned on so I could find it by playing a little game of hot and cold. I’d done that before when crashing my Acrobrat in a different spot and it had worked great. There was a big problem with my plan though that I didn’t realize until later. The FrSky receiver that came on the HX100 quad did not support telemetry, which is important because telemetry is how the radio displays a range strength value. So I was wandering around in this field looking at a zero number that wasn’t changing, and assuming it was because I just was too far away and not that it would never not be zero even if I was right on top of the quad. It wasn’t until I got to the edge of the corn field which I knew was well past where the quad had crashed that I finally realized my mistake.

I turned of my radio at this point and instead tried studying the video feed in my goggles to see if I could tell where the quad was. There wasn’t much to go on though, unless I got very lucky and saw myself walking by.

After a couple of minutes though the video feed cut out, and the battery had been totally drained. This was the point when I first thought I might not be getting the quad back. I was standing in the middle of a large farm field with no idea how to locate a nearly brand new microquad.

At this point I had two issues to deal with. First, I was well overdue to be back at my in-law’s house for lunch after which we were supposed to be heading home. Second, I had no idea how I was going to locate the quad. This was bad as beyond just losing an expensive piece of electronics, I was sure my father-in-law wasn’t going to want to have that sitting out in his field and then getting tilled under at some point and leaching into the soil. There’s a lot of stuff used in electronics that you don’t want in a soybean or corn field.

I drove back to the house and first let my wife know I wasn’t going to be able to leave just yet. Then I grabbed my tablet and an SD Card reader so I could more easily review the DVR recorded from the quad than I could from my goggles. I was hoping something in the video would help me locate it. Lastly I drafted my sons to come out and help me search.

I drove back out to the field I’d been flying with my search party. I watched the tail end of the flight video several times and thought I knew generally where it should be, so we started to hunt around in that park of the field but had no luck after several minutes. After looking at the video again, I finally realized I was misreading the tree line in the DVR video from right before the crash. It wasn’t the stand of trees at the east end of the field, but a gap in the treeline along the south part of the field where a gas line was buried. I had been looking in the wrong place all along and taken my search party back to the same spot and continued to look in the wrong spot. My oldest had actually been asking me about that other treeline after watching the video over my shoulder. He was very excited to be right.

The actual useful frame from the DVR before the crash with the gap in the treeline.

Once we started looking in the right part of the field, we found it pretty quickly. That actually surprised me, as I figured it would take some luck to see it among the ground cover that had been planted, but the black canopy and blue props stuck out pretty well from the brown and green.

I made a lot of mistakes trying to find my quad. I should have realized that I didn’t actually have telemetry on the quad. I should have had the tablet out with me from the start in case I needed to review the DVR. I also had made a mistake the week before when configuring the quad. I had turned off the setting in Betaflight that would cause the motors to beep when the receiver loses connection to the radio. I hadn’t ever needed it before since I’d rarely lost the receiver connection and could use the radio to turn on the beeping manually if I needed help finding it in the grass. I turned it off though because it was beeping whenever I plugged in a battery while it was connected to USB in order to make a VTX change without having my radio on as well. So one of the first things I did when I got home was turn that option back on.

Failsafe Crash Clip
Full Flight

Flying Outside

We had an unusually warm day in February and I seized the opportunity to start flying outside. I briefly tried the back yard but decided it was a bad idea because the tree line there seemed tailor made to snag my drone, and I was scared of getting it stuck high enough I wouldn’t be able to get to it. There were also some low spots in the yard that really held onto water and I really didn’t want to crash into one of those and ruin the quad. The front yard was much better to start out in with less trees. I could use the road, the sidewalks, and fly in the neighbors yards with less chance of bothering anyone.

As much as I’d been looking forward to it, I wasn’t prepared for having to start over again with my comfort level. Beyond the fear of getting stuck somewhere, moving outside posed a whole new set of challenges for me to keep in mind, and I felt like I had when I first started.

My Acrobee only weighs 30 grams with the battery, so I couldn’t fly if there was very much wind. Although I did find that as long as the wind was consistent I could fly in stronger winds than if it was gusting a lot. I could compensate in cases where the wind was consistent, at least up to a certain point.

Once I got comfortable, flying outside really ramped up my excitement in the hobby. After being stuck inside for months, it was a real thrill to be able to get some speed and altitude and try some tricks.

One surprise with flying outside was I reminded that cold weather makes plastic brittle. The whoop frame that I’d been flying for a couple of months started to crack after a few crashes. Initially I tried some super glue, which is my default adhesive for fixing things. It didn’t work well for frame repairs though. It’s too brittle. Repaired spots just broke again after the next impact. Next I tried E6000 adhesive. I’d like to say I did a bunch of research and settled on it, but the truth is I found it in a drawer in the kitchen and decided to try it. E6000 turned out to be perfect for what I needed. It stuck well to the plastic frame and dried to a rubbery consistency so it absorbed impacts pretty well. As a bonus it was easy to clean off of my fingers afterwards.

Despite my best efforts, I did eventually crash into water.

Around Easter time while flying at my Uncle’s house I ended up glancing off a tree branch and crashing into a tiny stream at the back of their property. I could see water at the bottom of the camera lens, so I yanked off my goggles and ran back to get it out of the water and unplug the battery. I was a little panicked but not too badly since the video feed was still active after it hit the water. I figured since it was still transmitting that it should be fine once it dried out.

Once we got home, I decided before I’d plug it back in again I should clean it to make sure that no mineral deposits had been left behind after the water evaporated, which I figured might cause a short. Unfortunately all I had in the house was regular isopropyl alcohol intended for first aid use, which wasn’t pure enough for cleaning electronics. For that I needed 99.9% pure alcohol. So I had to order some and had to wait a few days before I could test to see if the quad was still working or not. Once it came, I took the quad apart and cleaned the flight board top and bottom as well as the back of the camera. I then let them set for an hour to air dry before plugging in a fresh battery to see if it worked. Everything came back up and seemed to be working the same as they had before their water landing. So I got lucky.

I haven’t had any more water accidents since then, and hopefully I don’t, but it was nice to know that I could recover from one. I just don’t want to test my luck on that again.