My FBL Atom 6HV maiden is in the books

[TheBum]

I flew my FBL Atom 6HV maiden this morning and, other than a brief bit of excitement, it went great! I'm using a V-Bar with the 5.0 Pro firmware and, other than changes to cyclic ring to keep the elevator arm from hitting the antirotation bracket, it flew *really* well with the recommended settings (Logo 500/600 setting on the sliders on the main screen). I did end up moving the ball on the tail pivot arm to the inner hole to get more within the recommended range with a 13mm servo arm. I'll probably tweak a few things, but it was too windy today to get a good assessment of any settings changes.

The excitement was as a result of my stupid mistake. I lifted off and flew for almost a minute before I all-of-a-sudden had a major reduction in collective travel. The heli set itself down as if I planned it, while I struggled to increase collective, so no harm was done. As it turns out, I forgot to put the screws back into the antirotation bracket after I had taken them out to swing back the bracket to to check something. It had swung back so that the swash was mostly twisting instead of moving in response to collective inputs.

Here are some photos of the heli just prior to the maiden. The last two were actually taken after I got home because I realized when I downloaded the photos from my camera that I missed those angles. Click on each photo to see a larger version.

[Dflyer]

Hey Alan,

congrats on the maiden, glad to hear you didn't break anything on this maiden. Nice pics !!

Grtz,
Dirk

[skunkworx]

Heck yeah, sweet pics man! You got me screaming at mine becuase it'll be a little while before it even gets off the ground! Gotta wait for that shipment of BeastX's to hit the US and then for them to ship it out to me. I could use getting some batteries and chargers, but likely that won't happen until I ditch my 450 and hock some of my RC cars. Wife just started school again, so I'm back in debt up to my eyeballs! Never seems to end I just can't wait to afford new servos to replace the ones I took out of the Knight. I want to fly the two side-by side and see how much of a difference it makes going to the electric.

[JustPlaneChris]

Congrats, Alan! Try to keep it in one piece until I can see it at SRC.

[helifuel]

want one. Looks great. nice job.

[TheBum]

Originally Posted by JustPlaneChris

Congrats, Alan! Try to keep it in one piece until I can see it at SRC.

I'll try to.

[kevinator9]

Very very nice! And awesome job!

[rsbull88]

If I may advise you, secure your wires around the vstabi.
LOTS of the persons i m flying have lost sensor cable or a servo cable, so now, we used "chicken wire" you know, to circle chicken when putting it to the hoven :p or even hot glue on top of connections to avoid losing a cable in the air.
There is around 15 Vbars in my club, maybe 20, we all use this tips

You pass the wire between the yellow red and brown servo cable in the plug, you do that throught all servos, and you secure the sensor.

At the end nothing can escape

[helinewby]

looks awesome cant wait to get my FBL HV! Keep the pics coming.. also make sure you put some shoe goo on those wires..

thanks C.B.

[TheBum]

Originally Posted by rsbull88

If I may advise you, secure your wires around the vstabi.

The sensor cable is secured. I built a pigtail for the CP port and used shoe goo to adhere it to the sensor connector. You can see it in the photo of the right side of the heli.

As for the servo wires, I've been running a VBar on my Logo 500 for over a year without securing them and haven't had any issues. I am considering using something to bundle the cables on the left side bus, which should make the cables keep themselves in place.

[JLH_1]

Alan,

Its 7:43 am in about thirty minutes we will be lifting off!!! I will let you know soon.

Jason

[Ah Clem]

Alan,

Congratulations!

I have been looking forward to your report, sir.

Again, your wiring/installation looks great as well!

[TheBum]

Originally Posted by Ah Clem

Again, your wiring/installation looks great as well!

Thanks. I discovered on my Knight 3D that the holes next to the boom case make an excellent conduit for cables, and the 6HV is the same way. The ESC started on the right side while I was setting up, but I soon discovered that the setup worked out better with it on the left.

[TheBum]

Apparently, VBar 5.0 is very tolerant of too-high cyclic gain.

I was looking at the cause for a bunch of "Cyclic Ring active" reports in the error log and going back over my setup. When I set up the VBar the first time, I used the precision setup with the heli on one of Prontow's heli stands and ended up with a gain of 100.

While I was trying to use a pitch gauge, the heli kept moving on me, so I put it on my Atom 500's hard case, which was resting on the floor. I decided to try the precision setup again and came up with a gain of 80. I double-checked it in the regular setup and got 8 degrees of pitch. Perfect.

I'm also going to go ahead with the mods on the antirotation bracket. My cyclic ring is now 63 to stop binding and I verified that I can go as high as 79 before the servo stops moving. Whether I can actually reach full deflection, I don't know.

Edit: I took my Dremel to the bracket and managed to get the cyclic ring to 75 without binding. I think I'll leave it there because any further will require opening the end of the ball peg slot.