Four FPV-sized propellers can hold a long carbon-fibre pole upright for hours without lifting it off the ground. That sounds like a strange endurance record for a quadcopter. It is actually a cleaner demonstration of a different problem: the speed at which an actuator can correct an error matters more than the peak force it can produce .
Read articleAn ESC configurator runs on a computer, while the electronic speed controller sits behind the flight controller on an aircraft. The laptop has USB; the ESC generally has a motor signal connection that is being used for something else. Letting the configurator read settings or flash firmware therefore requires a temporary change in ownership of that connection.
Read articleAn onboard camera needs a name so that a ground-control application can show its settings. It should not get to choose a directory on the operator's computer.
Read articleClip a gate, a branch or the ground at the wrong angle and a quad can start spinning flat on yaw, warbling and climbing while the sticks do nothing. The Betaflight wiki calls this Yaw Spin To The Moon (YSTTM). Betaflight 3.4 added two pieces of code to deal with it: yaw spin recovery and gyro overflow detection. Both are on by default, and most pilots never need to touch them. It still helps to know what they do, because the wrong threshold shows up as strange yaw stutter in normal flight.
Read articleA quadcopter that survives a collision can still fall out of the air. The frame may remain intact while the aircraft tumbles, the propellers lose useful orientation and the state estimator stops trusting measurements that no longer resemble ordinary flight. Collision tolerance therefore has two distinct tests: whether the machine survives the impact, and whether it can regain controlled flight afterward.
Read articleA hundred illuminated aircraft can form a readable shape for an audience while being dangerously close to one another in three-dimensional space. The artwork is the visible part of a drone light show. The less visible work is assigning each aircraft a time-indexed path, ensuring those paths remain separated when position and timing are imperfect, and deciding what the fleet does when an aircraft or communication link goes wrong.
Read articleA survey can be flown by two aircraft along nearly identical tracks and still produce two datasets with different coverage, blur, coordinate quality and processing success. Copying the waypoint coordinates preserves only part of the plan. The photographs depend on a camera model, its shutter behavior, the aircraft's actual speed and height above the surface, and the way each flight stack interprets the mission.
Read articleBetaflight has two settings that sound like they do the same job: throttle limit and motor output limit. They don't. Throttle limit only changes what your throttle stick asks for. Motor output limit caps what the flight controller can send to the ESCs, whatever the PID loop wants. If the goal is to protect motors and ESCs, for example when you put a 6S pack on a drone with 4S motors, only motor output limit does the job.
Read articleA waypoint list can tell a drone where to fly. It cannot, by itself, tell the aircraft where a tree crown begins, whether the approach crosses another crown, or how far above the foliage the camera will be when it takes a photograph. For repeatable close-up forest surveys, those are separate geometry problems.
Read article"What camera angle do you fly?" gets asked at every field, and the number on its own tells you very little. Camera angle is the upward tilt of the FPV camera relative to the frame's top plate. It doesn't change the tune, the rates or the top speed. What it changes is where the horizon sits in your goggles at a given speed, and that quietly decides how fast you end up flying.
Read articleA Betaflight preset is a short block of CLI commands with a description and a few options. The Presets tab finds it, lets you tick the options and sends the lines to the flight controller for you. It saves typing, but it writes to the same settings you would change by hand. The firmware-presets repository opens with a warning: a saved preset permanently changes the configuration, and there is no undo.
Read articleQuickShots and MasterShots are the two buttons in DJI Fly that fly a camera move for you. You pick a subject, press start, and the drone climbs, circles or backs away on its own, then flies back to where it began. The results look good with almost no skill, which is exactly why it is worth knowing what the drone is about to do before you press the button. An automated shot follows a path you can't see in advance, and a few of the moves need far more room than people expect.
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