Adventures in time & air

The RCE-BL35X has proven 2 B a real disaster. Firstly, spool up with too much positive collective & it locks in a hopelessly low RPM. Spool up with neutral collective to get it into a useful RPM. Secondly, it frequently loses its settings during reboots & goes to variable RPM mode.

Now, after 5 min flying the A560 in autopilot, disengaged the autopilot & everything was nominal.

Pulled collective to neutral to descend & the RCE-BL35X went into full throttle. It stayed locked wide open through landing & cutoff. Having pitch set extra high for low RPM made for exciting flying.

Suspect the 35X let its throttle integral increase very slowly in response to the high payload and it didn't drop when the collective dropped. The workaround is to use the autopilot to descend out of the shooting position.

Finally got our first 3k images from the computerized beast. 173 3k images taken during autopilot were scaled down to 1920x1440 & hand stabilized. Gootube can't play 1920x1440 of course. This segment includes operator directed climb in, 2 minutes of autonomous hover & operator directed descent out.



The HD master is on

Night timelapse from autonomous helicopter (0 min 17 sec)