FBL Gyro Fine Tuning with Spirit Pro

[Heliman450]

Hi all, I'm pleased to say that I was able to get to the field this morning to carry out another 'maiden flight' after overhauling the tail rotor assembly. I decided to go for the whole lot new instead of just stripping the old one down and I think it was the best decision. The tail is quite amazingly different and stays rock solid without a hint of wobble when viewed tail in. Sorry no video of it yet, I've been travelling light to the field on my last couple of visits and only took two batteries with me anyway.

I also selected the 'Coaxial' mode for the Spirit Pro (sorry Steve ) to see what the difference is like. I found it extremely useful for the maiden flight and will probably use it in future for that purpose. I must say that it didn't feel much different than the 'Normal Stabilisation' mode although it did seem to be snapping back to the horizontal much quicker when giving some quick roll commands from the cyclic but my experience of lots of different modes isn't great.

One disadvantage is that the 'Coaxial' mode only seems to be selectable via the PC and not using my Jeti DC-14 but maybe that's a software version issue. I'll investigate further on that.

Bye for now!

 

[Smoggie]

Phil,
I'm guessing that 'coaxial' stability gives stronger self leveling, just like those toy coaxial helis you buy in shopping malls etc. This is great for hands off hovering, but I'd guess that it might be a liability when it comes to doing anything more advanced. If it's anything like a real coaxial even forward flight at any reasonable speed will be difficult because the heli will fight you, all it wants to do is hover. In the wind it might especially be a problem as it may tend to drift away on the breeze, real coaxials do this all the time!

 

[Heliman450]

Phil,
I'm guessing that 'coaxial' stability gives stronger self leveling, just like those toy coaxial helis you buy in shopping malls etc. This is great for hands off hovering, but I'd guess that it might be a liability when it comes to doing anything more advanced. If it's anything like a real coaxial even forward flight at any reasonable speed will be difficult because the heli will fight you, all it wants to do is hover. In the wind it might especially be a problem as it may tend to drift away on the breeze, real coaxials do this all the time!

Hi Steve,

At the moment my farmer friend has most of the field fenced off and has been grazing his cattle on it. Maybe something to do with an end of season 'bio-fertilization' or something so we can't fly over it, I'm seeing him later so I'll ask him why it is. He doesn't do any muck-spreading on it during the growing season so maybe I'm correct in my assumption.

My feeling was that flying around with the 'Coaxial' mode wouldn't have been too much of a problem although I suspect that it would have pulled up very quickly when, for example, the forward flight command was stopped. When I get access to more of the field, I'll give it a try. I suspect that at the moment, my skills won't be handicapped at all by the mode. Someone able to fly as I've seen you do in your videos is of course another story. My idea at the moment is to see what's needed to bring someone from scratch to a reasonably confident pilot who can fly a bigger heli such as my T-Rex 550 without buying all the sizes in between but using whatever tech's available to achieve it. Progress would then be through the various modes of programming. I for one have found turning the initial simulator training into real-life flying a bit difficult.

I'm sure that there's an appetite for such a thing lurking in our club but nobody's been prepared to stick their neck out and do it due to whatever historical prejudices exist. I'm already hearing that more people are going up there since I began cutting the grass for better access. From little acorns.................. as the saying goes.

Bye now!

 

[Smoggie]

These stability systems really are game changers, anything that makes helis more accessible is good as far as I'm concerned. The dilemma though is if/when you start reducing the strength of the stabilisation and eventually turning it off altogether. I guess that if all you want to do is 'scale' type flight then you could just leave the stability on 'forever' but if you want to do any form of aerobatics (not necessarily 3D) then you would want to wean yourself off it.

The handling of a heli is very different without stabilisation so for those who do intent to eventually fly without, it probably makes sense to start reducing it's strength sooner rather than later. I'd guess that flying with strong stabilisation for a long time might make it quite hard to adapt to 'un-stabilised'.

 

[Heliman450]

Hi all, latest update on this thread...................

Today, I spent quite a while at the helipad clearing away the leaves from the nearby trees and generally tidying up so that we can use it for as long as possible, hopefully throughout the winter, bringing me to the main reason for entering this info.

Recently, I've not been getting very good performance from my batteries (about 50% flying time) and was wondering whether a heater bag would improve the situation so I forked out some readies to try it out. I did a test at home and one 3 Cell battery lasted for 40 minutes. Quite a while and enough to keep two batteries at 40 deg C. The main problem I saw was that my home is a constant 23 degrees and the field currently zero! I lashed up a bit of insulation in the form of an old sleeveless jacket and wrapped the whole lot in it.

I think it was pretty good result. My test had one battery not in the heater bag and it lasted for about 4 minutes of hovering with landing a couple of times to tweak the throttle curve. The second battery lasted 5 minutes with a constant hovering period. My only failure was that I didn't start the bag heating until I was actually at the helipad, so it wasn't quite up to temperature before using it. I need to make up a cigar lighter connection so that I can run it off the car on my way there and then connect the battery for the walk to the field and the waiting period before use.

Following on from the use of the 'Coaxial' setting in my Spirit Pro, I don't think that it gives the best performance just on its own. It needs the settings changing to improve the performance. I think I'll just carry on using the 'Normal Stabilisation' mode as the settings are quite good now.

Bye!

 

[Heliman450]

Hi again,

The weather's looking good at the moment and we're getting a southerly wind (der Fohn), which is giving us very nice double figures, great for flying/testing.

I managed two batteries' worth of just over 9 minutes................ ah, ha! I hear you saying. This is still well short of my best durations having achieved 9 minutes per battery. I reckon that at least these batteries are on their way out and right now, I'm only using two right now as I've converted the connectors to Supra X on my other two ready for use with my new T-Rex 700X. I need to convert all connections and then I'm back to being able to get four sessions on the 550 and two on the 700. I'd prefer not to buy more batteries until the real flying season starts again next year. Let's see how that goes.

I switched back to the 'Normal Stabilisation' mode from 'Coaxial' and quite honestly see no difference between the two modes with my normal conservative (BORING?) flying style.

Now that I've got my T-Rex 550 back in the air and nothing seems ready to drop off, I'm going to run through some different settings using my Jeti DC-14 to make the changes at the field. The settings seem very odd to me and I have no idea by how much the changes vary. For example, when a range is 1-7, what exactly is each step?? If anyone can throw some light on this I'd appreciate it as I got no response what-so-ever from Spirit when I asked them some time ago.

Bye for now.