The R2 Copter Awakens

This is the fourth and final post in the quadcopter series on the Jedi Gardener blog. I'm sure by now you have ordered your parts and have begun to put together a quadcopter of your own.

Like any good Padawan I have learned many things in my first month of flying.

My first day out I was very excited. I had tuned everything, made sure the motors were spinning the correct direction and entered some initial parameters into the flight controller. I started taking off, attempting to hover close to the ground and each time I would take off one of the propellers would spin off. I hand tightened it back on and kept flying. Off it would pop again. This happened a few times.

I decided to take it up a little higher. At around 15 feet off the ground the propeller popped off and the copter flipped over and crashed to the ground.

Unfortunately the crash broke the motor mount off of the frame and I lost one of the collets that attach the propeller. I was very sad. The gunk on the arm is where I tried to jb weld the parts together. It didn't work.

This leads to lesson number one. Always have extra parts on hand. Luckily I had ordered a spare frame just in case I broke a part and it came in handy. I haven't broken anything else besides propellers but I think its good to have a spare motor and esc on hand especially when shipping things from overseas.

So lesson number two is make sure your propellers are very tight. Now I use a screw driver through the collet to make sure they are super tight and I haven't had a propeller pop off again.

It is also very important to balance your propellers to ensure that there is little vibration during flight. I built a wooden prop balancer with magnets and a sewing needle. If one blade is heaver I just do a little sanding on the inside of the blade until it balances. It seems to work pretty well.

After the copter flipped over I realized that I needed to protect the flight controller on the top and this led to the R2Copter dome. It also gives it a bit of a friendly personality. I made the dome with an upside down bowl and some paint

I plan to post a video of the copter flying around but need to go out to an open field sometime.

I have also started to take some aerial pictures of the new garden. Here are some examples. As you can see this will be a lot of fun and I'm sure very useful for evaluating irrigation patterns.

Here are some normal garden pictures:

This is the start of the new gardening season and it is going to be a sunny one.