Fun and DESTRUCTION (2)

Wow does time (and my tiny whoop) fly. I have had a great week of flying my QX90 inside and outside. I have brought it with me whenever I go out, as you can see from some of my videos post which take place at my Uncles house. Crashing has been a pretty common occurrence for me. I have broken more than 20 of my 3D printed prop guards. Luckily, they cost less than a penny each to print. I also have broken 6 propellers (costing a whole $0.15 each). I hoped this would be the extent of the damage but unfortunately that is not the case. On Monday, I flew with a battery that was too low for flying and was unable to complete a punch-out as planned. Because of the resulting voltage drop stemming from sudden amp draw on the already depleted battery, the craft could not complete the banked turn I tried to do and started to oscillate about 35 degrees from its axis until it flipped and hit the ground. This picture shows why rapidly moving above 35 degrees on such a small aircraft is so problematic. Instead of being felt by passengers like the picture says, it was applied to the opposite end of the aircraft as well as the FC, which is MUCH more problematic.

The impact knocked the lens and CMOS assembly off of my FPV camera. Unfortunately, this is not something that can be easily fixed. I ended up having to buy a new camera  and replace the existing one I soldered the replacement unit into the lowpass-filtered section of my F3 Evo flight control board and it works! I was only out of the air for 3 days, but if felts like forever.

Here is a video of the crash. When the video goes white, that is when the camera fell apart, yet the TX still transmitted video (impressive!) 

The damage 

Whoopin Around the Chicken Coop

Over Under, & Through -Tiny Whooping

3 Minute Long Tiny Whoop Flight without Crashing! -Personal Record

Welcome to Team GreenHopper FPV (1)

This was my first week to Tiny Whooping! What fun. Tiny whoop is the newest craze in the multirotor hobby which involves small, brushed quadcopters carrying AIO camera with a live, analog down-link. Tiny Whoops are all custom built aircraft that use extremely powerful coreless motors made by Chaoli  and advanced flight controllers like the F3 Evo running sophisticated software like BetaFlight.  My goal is to be able to reduce my lap times by 33% on multiple courses. I plan on flying indoors in both large and small rooms, outdoors in an open area and outdoors with obstacles. I also am making a YouTube channel, Team GreenHopper to show my progress.

The aircraft I will be flying to start out is a custom built quadcopter based off the carbon fiber QX90 frame. It has the newest F3 flight controller and a super small flysky receiver to take control input from. It took over a week to find the best parts to use and over an hour and a half to build it. I certainly got to practice making a lot of very small solder joints which was difficult.

 Here are a few pictures.

I also modified my ev800 goggles with a DVR so I could record my flights and upload them to YouTube. This took a lot of research and planning to be able to do since their is no documentation for the modification. I ended up having to use an oscilloscope to find the video output of the integrated receiver. After I did this, I soldered the input from the DVR to the V-Out on the googles, and after using a multi-meter to find ground and VCC, those were soldered in too. In the end, it worked out well as you can see in the picture below.


Finally, I added a few 3D printed parts to the quadcopter that I printed out at home with ABS filament. I added an antenna protector to keep the AIO camera safe and prop guards to ensure my propellers don't mess up the walls. Overall, it was a very productive week!