Thanks ET. I did that last night, but it hit me today that I used the tricopter model in my radio which has the throttle set to 125% travel. I will try this with another model set to 100%. If all else fails, I guess I'll use 1190 as my minthrottle. I really just want to make sure that the motors are hitting full throttle when they need to.

Tim

 

So when Mike got on the tricopter kick and I decided to build one, I decided I was going to design a circuit board for my QSC tricopter because the hard wired thing is messy. I built a QSC tri and wired it like in John Bernard's video. There were wires everywhere. Then John and Mike released their board, but I already had mine pretty much designed by that point and wanted to see if it works. I discussed my board with John, he gave me a few pointers and I stole a few ideas from their board to refine mine. Anyway, I finally ordered the boards from ExpressPCB and received them this week. I also got my components from Tayda Electronics (more on that in a minute). Anyway, I started soldering all the components in and got it done in pretty short order. I plugged in the FTDI programmer to my computer and newly fabricated board and got an error. I started looking at the board and found I had put 4 pins in the wrong order for the Arduino Pro mini. :girl_cray2: Fortunately, I was able to cut two traces and solder in two wires to fix the problem and now it works. It was pretty fun to step out and design and build my own board even if it was from someone else's schematic. I am looking forward to getting the tricopter back up and flying. I still need to make a few wires to go from the board to the receiver and mount everything on the frame.

As far as Tayda Electronics http://www.taydaelectronics.com is concerned, here is my experience. They are located in Bangkok, Thailand and sell electronic components at very attractive prices with excellent shipping costs as well. I ordered the capacitors, LEDs, resistors, etc for my QSC tri board. They shipped my order within about 2 days and it took about 9 days to arrive after they shipped. When I inventoried my order, I found that the resistors I ordered were not what I thought I ordered (they were 390k instead of 390). When I went back and looked at my order though, they sent me exactly what I ordered. That k sure makes a big difference in how bright you LEDs will be . The components are of ok quality as far as I can tell, and they are working well in my tricopter board so far. The wire on the resistors is really soft. All the resistors I have ever ordered from Mouser et al have a much stiffer wire. We'll see how long the diode and caps last. I don't anticipate any trouble, but it wouldn't surprise me to have an issue after several hard landings either.

Hope this helps anyone else considering building one. I have to say that after building one hardwired and one from a board, there is no way I will hard wire one again.

Tim

 

I have attached some pictures of my QSC tri and the board I made. It is not flyable right now, but it was flying with the hardwired method that Mike and John had outlined in their build notes. I work for a company that does avionics work (among other things) and was able to pick up a little spiral wrap that was going in the trash to wrap the motor wires (shown in the pics).

The plywood parts were cut on my bandsaw. I have since created a CNC file to cut out the parts, but I built this before I had my MK II cutting well.

The QSC board that John Bernard designed is really an experimenter's board. There are several gyros and accelerometers that can be used which is pretty cool (especially since Nintendo is going to be discontinuing the Wii Motion Plus as a separate board).

I designed this board with the Nintendo brand Wii Motion Plus (WMP) and Nunchuk (NK) in mind. The wires removed from the two boards have a 2mm spacing so I bought some 2mm headers from Sparkfun and used them to solder the WMP and NK boards to my board. I did put in wire holes so that knockoff boards can be used as well though.

A couple of things to notice about my board design (due to my errors): The WMP board is upside down from the way that the MultiWii software was designed to have it mounted. This was due to a little lapse in attention on my part (I reversed the pin locations). The result is that the roll axis is reversed. The MultiWii software does have a yaw reversal setting but it does not have a setting to reverse roll, so I had to go in and find it. It was relatively easy to fix once I found it in the software. I added two new variables to be able to reverse the pitch and roll axis along with the yaw and modified the equations to use the new variables. I am not a programmer, but the software is really well commented so the change was pretty simple.

I mis-labeled 4 pins for the Arduino Pro Mini in the board design software which lead me to put the traces to those pins in the wrong place as well. Fortunately, the fix was pretty minor. I had to cut two of the traces and solder in two jumper wires.

I think the next board I build up will have the wires that go to the receiver soldered in rather than using the jumper pins. The pins are nice, but they can come loose and cause control failure.

Tim Attached files