First flights today! I've been having sooo much fun playing with the board with different test firmware that I didn't want to stop and really use it. Tom's circle navigation really got my attention so I decided to install the board in an airplane I already had and do some flying with it.
I used a precision aerobatics katana, very popular in the states three or four years ago. Hacker outrunner and ESC, Hitech servos and Hitech receiver modified for PPM. It was only about 30 minutes of work to retrofit the airplane for the gluonpilot board and GPS module. I mechanically reduced all control surface travels to about 1/2 of where they were set for aggressive 3D flying. Then I spent a few days checking everything multiple times and looking at all of the failsafe issues. That wasn't really necessary because I think Tom has already considered most of the issues I was looking at. I used the same initial gains Tom provided from his funjet - I will eventually do some more tweaking - because it is very docile now. The rudder is only manual and is connected directly to the receiver via PWM.
The first flight I did was just two trips around the pattern in manual mode only. I wanted to establish exact trims and find a stable flight power setting. I then downloaded the flash and checked to make sure everything was tracking correctly.
During the second flight I tested the "stabilized mode" during a straight and level pass and then made a large oval. Perfect!!! Then I did some basic acro so I could check the imu performance. Too cool!!! I'm going to spend some time reviewing the data now!!!
I've attached some photos, youtube re-creations, and the KMLs below
Short trim flight
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First stabilized flight - then some acro!
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