Quadrotor Update

After too many days of everything remindlyo I decided that today would be the day I finally got off my ass and finished putting together my quadrotor. There were a bunch of minor dramas that made me drop it for much too long, all detailed below the fold.

Drama number one was trying to get my Wii Motion Plus knockoff working. It never did, and in fact I'm pretty sure I completely fried it somehow. The software stopped reading the sensor, and some test software I wrote made it apparent that the sensor, even if it was responding to I2C protocol, was only responding with zeroes.

So, that sucked. I eventually pulled myself out of that deep black hole and ordered a replacements sensor from SparkFun. It was pretty expensive but it includes a three axis gyro and a three axis accelerometer on one tiny little board. Ordered, shipped, received. As I was soldering pins onto it I noticed a little 'VCC 3.3v' mark on it. Uh oh. My Arduino is 5v! Back into the deep black hole!

Literally months later I circled back and ordered this little part, a 5v to 3.3v logic level converter. Oh, and a 5v to 3.3v regulator. Oh actually two of each, in case I blew something up again. Took me awhile to get around to actually putting it together, which brings us to today. Soldered up the level converter, hooked everything up, put the propellers on, aaaaaaaaand....

It's too heavy.

The propellers flew off the motors before it moved even an inch above the floor.

Crap.

Anybody have suggestions for better propellers, or how to calculate what kind of propellers I need? As is, the whole thing is 445 grams incluing the battery.

Posted in: Hardware  

Tagged: Hardware