Home Made Helicopter Gyro First Tentative Flights (19-04-2009)

[MJHN1998]

can somebody tell me if the tail rotor has to blow in a specific direction?

[Positivedelta]

@MJHN1998 Yes it does, the tail rotor has to counteract the torque reaction of the main rotors. If the main rotor is spinning clockwise, then the body of the helicopter will try and rotate anti-clockwise (as caused by the torque reaction). So in this case the tail rotor will "blow" in a direction so as to stop the rotation of the body.

[Origamifusion]

What is its range?

[Positivedelta]

@Origamifusion In terms of the RF link, the range is probably about 1/2 a mile. However, once the heli is out of site you wouldn't be able to fly it, so the real range is only about 200 to 300 metres. Depends on how good your eye sight is...

[ht448]

Reminds me of that Toy soigers movie :P

[GDIH100]

How much did it cost?

BTW Nice job, man!

[Positivedelta]

@GDIH100 It cost about £200 to make the PCB and buy the components, plus a boat load of man hours developing the firmware...

[downloadstuffgames]

this is really stable :O

[MOHAEDJAWAD]

great job

[JaleelJohanson62]

Nice job! Did you do the code in 'C'?

[Positivedelta]

Thanks for the comment. We did consider C, but in the end opted for good old assembler... It's not as bad as you might imagine, and Microchip's MPLab IDE takes out most of the pain. I don't think that using C would have made much difference to the development time (to be fair we do have quite a bit of dsPIC assembler experience).

[BMSilverFish]

nice

[JaleelJohanson62]

MPLAB IDE got much better from 6.XX upwards. I've used the PIC24FJ128G006 and it's a nice part....

Did you take advantage of the built-in DSP functions of the PIC30?

[Positivedelta]

Initially we only used the 40 bit accumulators, but we are about to experiment with some FIR filters and will implement these using some of the specific DSP instructions.

[pakscienceclub]

awesome