While I’ve been continuing to find time to practice with a flight sim, I decided that I wanted to try flying my Blade mCX2 for real. I have to say it was a lot of fun and easier than the TRex 500 I’ve been using in the sim, but there were still a few gotchas.
The most important thing I found was to read the manual carefully and follow its steps. Most importantly, the steps on how to sync your transmitter, how to make sure the controls are setup, and the on/off procedure for flights after you’re synced.
The main difference between turning things on the first time and later after you’ve synced your transmitter is that only for the first time will you turn the helicopter on (by plugging in the battery) before the transmitter. Otherwise, turn the transmitter on first and make sure the rotors are set to the lowest level so that you don’t injure yourself with the blade accidentally spinning up.
Also before your first flight, look closely at the swashplate (the piece connecting the blades to the body of the helicopter that translates your commands for the aileron or left/right and elevator or forward/backwards to changes in the blades). What I found is that my aileron control was flipped from the sim for really flying the mCX. Fortunately flipping it was as easy as taking a screwdriver and moving the knub by the aileron control at the bottom of my transmitter from the top to bottom.
When I first went to fly, I discovered that my helicopter’s trim was way off. I slowly brought up power to the rotor, not letting the helicopter lift off, and looked to see how it wanted to move. What I found was that the top rotor stopped spinning right away, causing the helicopter to spin counter-clockwise immediately. At first, I wondered if my helicopter was broken, but then I spent some time adjusting the trim on my transmitter and got it as close as I could to trimmed (meaning it didn’t really spin or drift in any direction). Finally, I increased the power to the rotor and let it lift off! I did my best to hold it chest high in a tail-in hover for the next few minutes, and wow did the 6ish minutes that my battery lasted go fast!
I’ve tried a few more times, too, and have now been practicing hovering with the helicopter’s left side towards me as well as moving it from point A to point B, with a tail-in hover at each point.
While practicing this flying, I’ve been doing more reading and investigating. My friend and co-worker Mark Harrison has also been getting into RC flying, and he’s been keeping a blog at http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/. He’s got some great info on there about both low-level electronics (both for planes and helicopters) and links to some cool flight videos.
It turns out that he’s been looking at multicopters, too, and we’re looking at building one together since our goals line up quite well (my goal’s to use it as an intermediate step to practice flying on, working up to a goal of using a larger copter to carry my big cameras whereas his goal’s to use this quadcopter to carry a GoPro or similar to do some aerial photography along the California coast). He pointed me to the arducopter and the KKmulticopter. Both seem to get better reviews than the Gaui 330x and have some pretty cool features. The KKmulticopter can hold a heavier payload (5kg, according to this post) but doesn’t have an accelerometer and has no intentions to add one (so if you take your hands off the controls, it’ll come to a level hover but continue traveling in the direction it was flying before). The arducopter has more features, but the kits are out of stock everywhere that I’ve seen (Mark told me they’re transitioning to version 2.0, and I’m not sure when we’ll see it available).
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Another reason to turn the transmitter on first: If someone else is attempting to bind their transmitter/receiver, your helicopter might bind to their transmitter before you get a chance to turn yours on. Hilarity ensues!