I-m highy interested in using something mechanically simpler and with less large blades than an heli as an aerial photography platform. That does require it to be able to hover hands-off reasonably stably with little more than some wind drift.

I understand a number of people have successfully used e.g. 120 degree CCPM mixing on their Tx together with gyros and v-mixers to get stable flight with tri/hexa-copters or quad/octa-copters. Has anybody tried mating any of these designs with either the Spartan AP2000i helicopter stabilisation system or with the Helicommand. I would assume the first might be more interesting with it-s infrared FMA sensor as this would be introducing an additional sensor to the gyros already being used, whereas the Helicommand would effectively be adding more gyros. Both would be adding electronic swashplate mixing to the airframe instead of from the TX.

Arthur,

IR stabilisation have typical sensor update frequenties of around 30 HZ, this is fine for helicopters since they are inherently are more stable.

For tri or quads a minimum of of 50 hz is required beter would be 100 hz or more.....
FYI the pulse to the (normal) servos is 50 hz but that doe not mean each pulse has a new value so the refresh rate of the sensor is the limiting factor.

I have (PCB for tricopter) combined FMA CPD4 with use of normal rate gyroscopes (before I switched to accelerometers and IMU) this works fine allthough it is a slightly expenive stabilizing solution.

Also remember no indoor flying and or flying near big buidlings possible!

Peter

Thanks Peter, that's clear.