5-6 years ago I built a 450 flamewheel quadcopter with an APM board. Followed the painless360 videos and everything worked out. Did not have long flight times, maybe 7-8 mins if I remember right but it did get me involved with mission planner and simple waypoint missions.
After crashing the thing 3-4 years ago and having a chance to fly an Inspired Flight IF1200 Hexacopter for comms testing at work using QGround Control I decided I needed to build a small hexacopter and learn QGround Control better.
I ordered an S550 hexa kit and assembled it about a month ago. But I could not get the Pixhawk to work with QGround Control, some issue with the compass. So I got an old pixhawk that someone gave me and gave that a try with Mission Planner. Was able to get that Pixhawk to arm after two weeks of on and off tinkering.
I could not get the props to turn at first. After another two weeks of tinkering and finding about a forum, whos members got me be going (plugged the escs into the aux ports instead of the main - felt stupid).
Got the thing in the air a week ago using Mission Planner. The first few flights playing with the battery alarm and critical voltages and trying to test how long the thing will stay in the air with a 4S6200 Lipo , about 14 min, with some spare capacity (700 mah).
Last couple days I've had some issues with uncontrolled drift and yaw., so bad the damm thing flew into a tree. I tightened the GPS stalk, recal compass and accels and it
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