UAV part 5: Switch to V911

Just when I started to make progress on my overvolted single-rotor helicopter, the tail motor blew up (as I knew it would). To move forward, I could have gone back to Syma S107s, but I’m starting to dislike the mechanical complexity of the coaxial system. I have a few of the WL Toys V911 helicopters and they’re awesome. Once you get a controller, you can buy the helicopters for $20, which is actually cheaper than the S107. The V911 is bigger, faster, and has more excess lift than the S107, and weighs in significantly lighter:

I stripped down one of my V911s to install a MATH board. There was no good place to mount the board so I made a 3D printed bracket that screws into the posts where the stock PCB attached. The bracket also has a tray to hold the battery. After I mounted everything, I found that the CG is too far forward. I’ll have to reposition the battery later to fix it, but in the meantime the V911 includes an easy way to compensate for this – the swashplate.

I plan on using the pitch control eventually, but for now I needed to lock the pitch and roll. I used pieces of music wire and bent them into links that connect the swashplate control horns to some studs on the frame. I intentionally left them too long so I can make adjustments by slightly bending the wires to reduce the length. This gives me pretty precise control and I was able to adjust everything into balance.

  

Then I had some weird issues with a lack of power from the rotors. I checked my PWM output on the scope and tested 4 different batteries (including the stock V911 battery) with no success. Eventually I figured it had to be my FETs, so I salvaged the motor FETs from the original V911 board and put them on my board, and that fixed it. I’ve never had issues with the FDN5630s that I always used on these boards, but this motor is higher current. Another difference is that on my first single-rotor I had higher voltage on the digital section so the FETs had a higher gate voltage to work with, so they may not have been saturated when I tried it here.

 I started with the same code I had used on my smaller single-rotor, and it held yaw immediately, but with some oscillations which you can see in the video. It’s very promising that the PID loop is transferable to a completely different physical system. I just need to make some adjustments to the gains now to get this one locked in. After that I’ll start on altitude control. I did a quick lift test by taping an ultrasonic rangefinder board to the helicopter to see if it could lift it. It could, but just barely. I’ll have to come up with another altitude sensing solution. I may just have to buy one of the more expensive rangefinders that use the single transducer.

I made some other progress towards helicopter autonomy this week—I got the optical mouse sensor working. The one I found in my junk bin was an Avago ADNS-1620. This part had no available documentation, but I did find a lot of similar parts with identical pinouts. They all have the same serial communication protocol, but some lunatic at Avago decided to put the same registers at different addresses in each variant of the sensor. I went through datasheets one by one and punched in new addresses until I found a set that worked. They came from the ADNS-2620 datasheet.

I now have the sensor reading out x and y movement, as well as a “surface quality” value, which is an indication of how good the focus is. I found that this value tracks the distance from sensor to surface with exact repeatability and plenty of modulation in the value as you move around near the target height… Yeah, that’s a free altitude indicator using a sensor that I was already going to include! The downside is it’s only for one specific altitude (whatever I choose as the focal distance with the replacement lens I find), but I think it’s a viable option. I may attempt that as an intermediate step before working out the weight issues with ultrasonic. Wouldn't that be cool to detect altitude based on the focus of the image of the ground?! This method has another significant drawback: if the helicopter goes high enough above the focal distance that it can no longer recognize the correlation of increasing height to decreasing image quality (because the image quality is equally low for different heights so far from the target), then it could just keep going up. Luckily I don’t have to worry about such things any more since I have the radio link, so I can experiment with it freely.

No code in this post, it’s still the same software as last time. I’ll upload a new one once I pull my mouse sensor functions in.