Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Hangar 2: 05 – Flying a Tricopter”.
Hello and welcome to maker hanger, my name is lucas weekley and today i’m going to be giving you some advice on how to fly your tricopter. So let’s get started first off like in last season. A simulator is your best friend, and a lot of them have multicopters already inside of them just like an airplane. When a multicopter faces you, its role and yaw controls are reversed and that’s just something: you’ll have to get used to another way. To practice your multicopter flying skills is with the use of a toy like this one. Most of these are quadcopters, but you can still learn the controls because multicopters in general fly very. Similarly, these things are so much fun and i have one just to practice. My flying skills and just to have fun with and what’s great, is they’re almost indestructible, so i’ve linked this one in the description. If you’re interested, the controls for a multicopter are identical to an airplane, so for a mode 2 transmitter which is what we fly in the us, you have your throttle and rudder control on the left and your aileron and elevator or roll in pitch control on the Right now that you have a general understanding of how to control a multicapture, you need to find a flight site for your tricopter, and my front yard is big enough for me to fly mine multicopters.
Don’T need that much space to fly and any front or backyard will do i’ve even seen people test their multicopters in their living room or bedrooms, but i don’t recommend that well now that we have our flight site, let’s go fly once you get to your flight Site just unfold, the frame and lock the arms into place, then turn on your transmitter and plug in the battery to your tricopter then arm it by putting the throttle rudder, stick in the bottom right hand corner to take off simply increase the throttle until the tricopter Starts to lift off the ground and then continue doing so until it clears all the obstacles around you now. Your first couple of flights will be dedicated to trimming out your tricopter. So, no matter how level you get your flight controller board when you calibrate the accelerometers it’ll always want to push a certain direction. So what you’re going to have to do is take off the tricopter see, which way it’s moving and then compensate that movement with the trim tabs. The multi wii flight controller boards are kind of nice in the fact that they’ll save your trims, no matter if you disarm them or not, some flight controller boards require you to save them inside their program and then zero out your trims later or just completely re-trim Them every flight, so you’ll just have to look at that inside the tutorials for your flight controller board. Now, if you’ve never flown a multicopter before these trimming flights are going to be the hardest thing for you to overcome. That’S because you’re probably nervous and your initial instinct when the tricopter gets off the ground and starts moving away from you, is to slow it down. So, if you’ve ever flown an airplane or driven a car, the way to slow them down is by letting off the throttle, but a multicopter can’t glide or roll. So the second you let off the throttle is just gon na fall straight down, so you’re gon na have to get rid of your instinct of killing the throttle and start correcting the tricaptor’s movements by rolling and pitching it to stay in a single position. All of this, while maintaining a constant altitude by decreasing and increasing your throttle.
Now, that’s probably going to take you a while to learn, and the tricopter has a 12 minute flight time. So you’re, probably gon na have to land and landing is pretty simple. All you have to do is decrease the throttle until the tricopter touches the ground and then the second. It does decrease the throttle all the way.
If you don’t kill the power completely, then the tricopter is just going to bounce around on the ground. Okay, now that we’ve flown around for a little bit, we cannotice that the tricopter may be yawing in a certain direction, because we have this motor horizontal and that’s okay, because of the torque roll from all the motors. The tricopter is going to want to spin one way, so the tail is going to have to counter that. So i’ve noticed that my tricopter has been veering to the right. Every time i go to fly so i’m going to move the servo arm, one click to the right just like that, so that now the motor will be pulling the nose to the left. So that’s going to counter that movement and if you need any more, you can always move another one or you can untighten these and then move them so that it goes the right amount you just have to play around with it until you’ve got it.
Where you want it, you don’t want to use your trim, because your trim is going to be used to do the fine tuning. So now i’m going to put the bolt in so this arm’s secure once your tri-captor is all trimmed out you’re ready to do some basic maneuvers that will help you learn the controls, start by picking a point on the ground directly in front of you and then Another about 20 or 30 feet forward of that point. Hover the tricopter directly in front of you then pitch it forward until it reaches the second point, then pitch it back and get into a hover at that secondary point. Once it’s hovered there for a little while bring it back and hover it right in front of you practice doing this maneuver until you feel comfortable with your pitch control, pick two points off the left and right of you and then use the roll control to move The tricopter between these points, when you’re doing any of these maneuvers try to keep the tricopter at your head level or above so you don’t get any turbulence off the ground.
Also, it’s very important to keep the front of the tricopter pointed away from you. So you don’t get disoriented once you’ve gotten the individual controls down. You can start combining them with a little bit of rudder control and you can get figure eight movements, but i’m still keeping the nose pointed away from me so that i don’t get disoriented once you’ve. Gotten good at hovering and flying around you’re ready to do some circuit flying which is exactly what we do with an airplane.
So you’re going to be looking at the front of the tricopter. Only do this when you’re completely comfortable with the controls or you might get disoriented in crash to start fly the tricopter the full length of your flight site, then turn it around and fly back the other direction and then just continue this. If you get disoriented or scared, all you have to do is yaw the tricopter so that the tail is facing you and then you know your orientation learning all these controls and getting comfortable with them will take some time and you’re definitely not going to be able To do it within the course of this video, so practice makes perfect, and i know i wasn’t this good when i first started off now that you have your tricopter, trimmed and you’re more comfortable with flying it it’s time for you to tune it. The settings i gave you will work, but you might want to change them to suit your flying style.
Now, if i had to explain to you what the pid settings did and how to change them accordingly, we’d be here for a while. So i’ve linked an article in the description from flight test website by matthewd, who wrote a very in-depth breakdown of what these settings do check that out and remember. This is all done through trial and error. You want to get the settings to how you like them, and i can’t do that, for you another way to improve the performance of your tricopter is by balancing the propellers.
This will remove a lot of vibrations that may be affecting your flight controller board or camera equipment. So, if you’re interested in doing this, i’ve linked a tutorial in the description below on how to do it just remember to have fun and keep practicing you’ll get great at flying in no time so, once you’ve gotten good at flying line of sight, you can start To try fpv or first person view this means using a video transmitting system to transmit the feed coming from the onboard camera of the tricopter and using that to fly the tricopter, i’ve linked a video series in the description about how to get into fpv. So, if you’re interested go check that out being able to fly with the tricopter’s perspective, allows you to maneuver in tighter spaces and fly farther away without losing your orientation like i’ve said before on maker, hangar fpv could be a series in and of itself. Luckily, there are plenty of resources for you to learn how to do it and i’ve linked a couple in the description below now.
Let’S see what the tricopter can really do. I plan on doing more projects with the maker hanger tricopter, so keep an eye out for those. That’S it for this episode next time i’ll be giving you an intro on the maker trainer 2.. So i’ll see you then thanks for watching .