New Quad copter build with Eagle N6 yawing issues

[sausageroll]

Hi Everyone,

Decided to build a quad rotor, so designed something up and fitted it out with 880kv motors from UnmmanedTech and 12x4.5 props (those cheap chinese Gemfan things, they keep breaking in flight, changing soon for APC slow fly). Will eventually use a higher end controler, Ardupilot, Naza etc, but just to get it off the ground to start with, we splashed out on the 35 quid eagle N6.

All seems OK, but there is a significant yawing problem. The platform constantly wants to yaw ccw. As novice pilots, its causing problems, as soon as its not tail in, a crash is almost certain. My frame is aluminium and carbon and it dosnt take crashing too well.

I was hoping for two things, hopefully someone can help us work out why the thing constantly wants to spin round all the time, and I was also hoping there may be a fellow multirotor person near us that we could meet up with and talk geeky about multirotors. Would be great to learn from someone who has already been through all of this!! We are in Maidenhead, Berkshire, near Slough, Marlow, High Wycombe etc, in the South east, not far outside the M25, J8/9 M4 or J4 M40.

I was also hoping someone could tell me what ATTI on the Naza is, im guessing its some kind of semi auto mode where the GPS and altitude hold helps the pilot along... If thats the case, thats just what we need!!

In the meantime, heres a few pics of the design, im pretty proud of it, even if it does take four hours to repair it.

[teslahed]

The yawing problem could be caused if one of your motor mounts isn't 100% straight.

Also it's unfortunate you bought the eagle flight controller for £35. There are cheaper and better flight controllers that come with more features and auto-leveling functionality. The NAZA has auto-leveling and works very well but costs quite a bit, you can get something almost as smooth and much more hackable for a lot less if you look in to MultiWii based controllers.

What's the Centre of Gravity like on your quadcopter? The lipo battery which is the heaviest single part looks a bit off centre. Most people mount those directly underneath the quadcopter to keep the weight centralised and as low as possible.

[Gaza07]

Hi Sausageroll and welcome to the forum, that is a very nice and looks to be a very well engineered frame well done it looks quality 
For some reason it makes me think of clocks are you a model engineer and make clocks ?

oh back to your problem have you tried adjusting the yaw pot, I have never had one of these boards but it looks like it works much like a KK board but with a mems gyro,
The problem with some of these boards like the KK is they can wander about a bit on the yaw and some times you just have to trim it the best you can, as teslahead said it can be a motor not sitting exactly vertical and can also be cured by shimming a motor to counter act the yaw is a fine balance thing, did you calibrate all your motors to your transmitter,

The Dji is a very very good flight controller but at a price, as far as I know Atti is attitude mode and is its most stable mode and will hold altitude, if you add the gps to this system it will indeed hold its position using the gps and hold its height to, it is the best at this in its price range and you would have to spend a lot more to beat it, There are a few Dji Naza users on here that may have more info then me,

The arducopter system is also good and now uses the APM2.5 but takes quite a bit of tinkering to get it right and isnt an out of the box fully working solution like the Dji Naza

Give the above suggestions a try and let us know how you get on, we will help as much as we can,
I'm afraid I live in Nottingham so cant be your geeky buddy  ::)

[sausageroll]

Hi Tesla and Gaza,

I make stuff for the film industry, mainly lens control motors and systems. Most of what I make is all CNC machined and everything, so now I find it very hard to build anything any way other than cad and CNC. Luckily, the laser cutting was not too expensive, and it looks amazing.


The battery is not quite in the middle, but no far off.

The motors are flat but one knock can put one out. Luckily the aluminium can be bent fairly easily. Will have another look, maybe one is a bit off whack.

Looking now at the naza. To be honest, im not mental about saving money if we can have a better system at the end of it all. Ive spent enough so far, id rather spend a little bit more on the naza over the wii or whatever if it means the quad handles better at the end of it. The eagle was always going to be a temporary solution, it was just so we could get the thing into the air whilst we worked out what controller was best.


The naza with the little flying saucer GPS module looks incredibly stable from what ive seen, do you think the Wii could be made to behave as well as this?


Pete.

[Gaza07]

The simple and short answer to this question is no, the naza is currently the best out of the box system it works and very well to 

The naza with the little flying saucer GPS module looks incredibly stable from what ive seen, do you think the Wii could be made to behave as well as this?


Pete.

[sausageroll]

Well my ultimate aim with this project is to have a stable platform for cameras etc, something that dosn't crash, battery lasts long enough etc. I love tinkering, but I a mostly a mechanical person. For me the gratification with this is building the physical frame, not so much playing with code to get it to fly stable. For me personally, id rather get it out of the box and see it work.

However, this is a joint project with a friend of mine, and he is more of a computery person than I am. It could be that he feels the multwii suits better. If this is the case, we will work it out between us, but I would rather go for the naza and the gps and know its gonna work and it wont crash. Already had one nasty crash!!

Pete.

[Gaza07]

It might be a good idea to build some thing on the cheap to practice flying some thing multi wii on one of the rctimer rm450 frames would make for a cheap practice copter and would fly much better than the Eagle N6 

[teslahed]

The MultiWii auto-level feature works very well if your motors and props are running smoothly but if you have excessive vibrations affecting your sensors it tends to be all over the place.

A lot of the more expensive flight controllers seem to deal with poorly balanced motors and props better so can seem to work better for people with poorly setup quadcopters who might be new to the hobby.

If you are good with the hardware and as you seem to have decent quality motors you shouldn't find a MultiWii quadcopter too difficult to fly - especially compared with the Eagle N6. MultiWii would definitely give your computery friend something to do if nothing else.

But if you can afford the Naza it will get you in the air quicker as it will be a lot less effort to get it working properly.

If you can get hold of a cheap enough MultiWii board (you might be able to find one for £10 second hand even) you can replace your Eagle N6 and see what you think of the MultiWii software with a minimum of hassle before you decide to spend £100s on a Naza.

[MadMax]

Welcome to the forum  Thats a very nice looking frame 
I started with a KK board much like your eagle board but soon moved on to multi wii it is a very good platform and no longer relies on parts ripped out of wii controller, infact I have never had any of the wii bits, I have a crius board like the one below they are very cheap to buy and very easy to set up

http://www.multi-rotor.co.uk/index.php/topic,95.0.html