Hello, guys.
Today I'm going to start putting together the Talon Pro.
This plane is designed for FPV, Long Range and autonomous flight,
and I'm going to use it for all of those things.
I'm going to be using Ardupilot, my favorite Autopilot software,
and this is the Mateksys F405 wing,
which is normal flight controller for this kind of fixed wing aircraft.
And it's not the best in the market, but it's more than enough
for what I want to do.
There is a lot of inputs and outputs,
and I'm going to show you all the details about this and I'm going to be fitting
some sensors like a GPS and airspeed sensor and many other things.
I'm going to also be using ExpressLRS for the receiver, tiny receiver
with tiny antenna, and it's supposed to have a long range with that,
and I'm going to put all their stuff there.
So it's going to be the most ambitious project that I have so far.
So let's get started.
So this is how the plane comes out of the box.
All the pieces come separate and you have to glue them.
And that's even better for me because that way you have easy access
to the structure and I can do any modification I want.
These are the main electronic components that I'm going to be using,
especially the flight controller
The Matek F-405 wing.
And I'm going to flash it with Autopilot.
I'm going to start doing the servos in the tail surfaces.
These servos are nothing special.
The special thing here is the glue I'm using UHU por,
and this glue is especial for foam, so it's not going to eat the foam
and it's very flexible and strong
on top of it, using white vinyl to cover it.
Then I'm putting everything together to visualize what goes where.
And this is the motor I'm going to be using,
and I'm going to use a six cell battery in the next video.
I'm going to build my own battery with 18650 cells,
which will give it an autonomy of hours of flight.
I'll be using a digital airspeed sensor, so I need to install this pitot tube,
and it's a lot easier to install it when the fuselage parts are separated.
And that's why I was saying that in the beginning and we could use the same
UHU por glue.
But this time I decided to use gorilla clear glue,
and this one doesn't expand as the other common one.
So this will be a lot better, and it's also flexible,
just like the UHU por, at the tail I didn't glue the top part
to have that gap so we can feed the ESC and cables off the motor in place,
and it's easier to glue the motor
when the two halves of the fuselage are glued already.
Now I'm going to glue the V-Tail stabilizers,
and I'm going to scratch the surface a bit so the glue has more grip.
And while the glue does its job,
I'm going to fix the stabilizer pinching some needles into the foam.
I'm creating my own extensions and connectors for the receiver
and for the sensors.
Again, I'm using this nano receiver from beta FPV which uses
express LRS and is a long range receiver.
I think that, placing it on the tail like that will keep it away from other
electronic noise and have a better quality signal, I'm placing the video
transmitter under a wing.
And I'm using the 1.3 gigahertz system to have a lot more range.
And now it's time to wire
or soldier, all the cables and pins to the flight controller.
And by the way, if you want to know more details about this project,
just visit joyplanes.com, I leave the link in the description below.
There is a blog post about this project with all the details you need
including a diagram on how I wired the flight controller.
Here I'm just testing the base of the flight controller made out of foam board
to fit inside the fuselage.
Then I will glue it and I open the little space for the GPS,
so it has better signal up there.
The next stage is critical.
I'm going to use the ardupilot software to configure and set up everything
that needs to be done
and make sure that everything works and everything is calibrated.
It's a lot of steps that I've had to do, and I'm
going to go through all of them again.
Visit their article for more information.
For now, I'm going to test the motor.
The idea of this simple test is to see how much power the motor
is going to produce.
And I was using the throttle at about 80% and as we can see, it is producing
or consuming about 25 amps of current.
And I think that's enough, and that power
should be more than enough to climb at a high rate.
And then if I throttle back to around 50
or 40%, the Amps consumption drops considerably.
So I think I'll have enough battery for about 20 minutes of flight time.
So it's time to finish up some details and also find the correct center of gravity.
I'm going to be using some more weights in the front of the aircraft
to make sure that the center of gravity is correct.
According to the instructions of this airframe.
And after making sure everything works
and charging the battery the next day, I went to fly.
there is ice ice stones.
There's definitely a break over there
on the clouds, but I think we're going to still have some rain later on.
And I'm not sure how's going to be so
everything is wet.
I don't think it's going to be a comfortable.
I took advantage of that little break
on the clouds and went ahead and prepare everything for the maiden flight.
And I did a little song that will tell you the story of what happened
that day with that maiden flight.
Plane rises to the air doesn't have air breaks,
fly by wire A using arduplane, many hours of work.
You don't even know it having flown before.
It's time to fly low.
No, wait, something's wrong.
I don't have control.
It drifts away from home. But what's going on?
Oh my God.
Oh my God, it's going down.
It's going to crash.
Hold on it didn't what?.
Yeah, it's still flying. What the hell?
I don't have a manual mode.
That's why to have control. Now I can't return home.
I think I'm losing all.
I think I'm losing all...
gyroscopic calibration, altitude appreciation,
airspeed indication, FPV visualization.
Nothing seems right.
Maybe I should have calibrated. And again, the center.
This is not correctness.
I wish should time regresses the PID's are off or something else is wrong.
Oh my God, what's going on? What's going on?
We really don't know. Let's go home.
The plane just crashed.
I couldn't tune it very well, and I made a very bad mistake, not
activating or not putting the manual mode as one of the flight modes,
and it was wobbling and then crashed.
I think it should be around here, so I'll take a look
should be just 100 meters from here.
OK, I found it guys.
I think I'm the luckiest guy on Earth look at that
just fell into this.
Wow, man.
We can still use it
actually not damage at all.
Well, I'm the luckiest guy on Earth, really.
I thought I was expecting a worst scenario like bits
and pieces that I was not going to be able to fly it again.
There it is.
The universe gave me another opportunity, so I'm not sure about flying today
anymore because.
After that the flight controller wasn't working properly.
It was rebooting itself
to fix that I re-flash it
with the same firmware, but it didn't do anything,
so I decided to flash it with betaflight firmware
to see if it erased the whole thing and then restart it from the beginning.
But after that, it wasn't working properly with betaflight,
and then I couldn't flash it with arduplane again.
It wasn't even connecting through the USB.
So I discover a piece of software from the same people that produces
the STM 32 microchip that allowed me to upload the Hex file
directly to the board and that resolve the issue.
So now let's review the flight and what went wrong.
Mainly, I didn't have elevator authority,
and now I remembered that the surfaces on the V-tail were not moving enough.
So now it's time to see what's going on.
So now I can see the problem apart from not activating manual mode.
Now I have manual mode and see here
this is connected to my device to measure the,
you know, the PWM signal, to see where it is at.
And this channel is part of one of the V-tail control surfaces.
So when I move here,
you see it's only getting up to 1600
microseconds and then go down
and it's 1240 microseconds.
So that's not enough.
And it's even in manual mode and manual mode should reach the maximum.
Now in ardupilot,
I didn't notice that if you go to this, this
setup here, the servo output.
You can see I'm looking at the same output
numbers and it's
using the default minimum and default maximum.
I just had to trim them a little bit,
but they're not reaching those maximum, as you can see there.
1645.
And the other one is reverse, so it goes to 1301
and then go down and they don't reach the maximum.
I don't know what's going on,
but as you can see in the elevator channel, the channel number two,
it is actually reaching the maximum, the minimum and maximum.
You see no problem, but it's happening only with a V tail configuration.
And not sure why that's happening.
But I didn't notice that this was a problem
until the flight, and that was a big mistake.
But after taking a look at the Ardupilot discourse
someone had the same issue and someone else mentioned the mixing
gain parameter, which is by default, 0.5, and it can go up to 1.2.
So I change it to one.
And voila, that's fixed the problem.
It is affecting their V-tail configuration, so you have to change that
if you want to keep the whole travel off the servos in manual mode.
For some reason, it doesn't affect the elevator, only their V-tail configuration.
After those adjustments, now, I'm ready to try again
and make the maiden flight, as you can see, I've put some vinyl
graphics on the plane to make it look better and more personalized.
And by the way, if you want to support the channel by buying the Talon
Pro airframe, check the description below where you can find a link.
Although I'm using the 1.3 gigahertz
video system, the quality of the signal was not very good,
so I kept the plane flying close to home and direct
line of sight.
I took off in manual mode, as you can see, then switch back to other modes
to test them, including autotune, to get a better response
in flight
I did two flights
and each flight lasted about 30 minutes.
Now I can't wait to make the big lithium battery pack for the next video.
And that was a successful maiden flight
after I landed, I started to wrap up for the day
and then someone approached me aggressively asking me what I was doing.
It turns out that I encountered Karen.
Just take a look at some of what I could record when I noticed
that this person was out of her mind. ....just for fun.
You think it's just for fun?
It is in your life.
You think you?
I teach people how to build the perfect.
What do you have?
It's it's just to say you are perfect.
three, I think.
three, you understand to be jealous because I'm not.
If I'm here, you have to ask me, can I do it first?
And you do it in a place.
You know, this plane is not taking videos of anything
you do.
You understand what I mean?
This is not a commercial drone.
This is just a laser drone.
Look, no, no, no.
You cannot do Beatles pictures.
I no doubt.
Yes, sir.
And I'm doing I free.
I can do something.
Well, if you're not free, you don't feel free.
That's OK, but not just me.
But look, I have my own.
I have my plane registered.
Hey, you can put this.
You can pay. And
I do understand what you mean.
You think it is my way every everywhere.
So but you are saying three, OK?
You're saying that I'm taking pictures of you from someone something?
No, not.
And I've been paying paid for from someone.
I just look, look on YouTube.
I have a good to look.
Do you want me to show you so I can?
I can say just things.
Now, look, I'm not on this planet.
You cannot take money
from people if you are here.
Look, look, you cannot take pictures.
I'm not here.
You cannot take pictures, videos of Virginia and Jose for you.
Don't ask. No, come on.
I have something.
OK, look, do you want to see Magic Johnson?
You have something.
OK, thank you. Fantastic.
You go eBay.
If you don't take it, I can kill this thing and be afraid.
Yeah, you can.
You can take it up with these things can be under on the prints.
The eBay.
Be away from these things on the road, on the way.
For the 3:00 a.m.. Yes.
I'm just flying here.
You have your son and I'm single too.
So do you have to?
Yeah, these are registration number is just bad.
These things?
No, this is from the Irish Aviation Authority had to pay for the contract.
Look.
Can you can you just about this idea?
I don't have any contract.
I don't have any contract. This is a beach.
This is a beach.
you can just fly around you at the beach.
I'm talking about the beach.
Yeah, my batteries are depleted, so I'm going now.
You go now
people, is f**** crazy.
I think this is the
the craziest one that I've seen so far.
These are very mad times were leaving in, so she was talking about like,
I cannot take pictures from them or something like that of the area.
So yeah, that's that's completely understandable.
But what they don't know is that I was actually not
taking pictures of anyone.
And yeah, I think if you told me something like,
you have to be careful with the people around or something like that.
Well, that's some more understandable. But
God, that was
that was the weirdest, the weirdest encounter I've had so far.
Well, guys, that's it for this video.
Next time, I'll be making the 18 650 cells battery
pack for a long flight and maybe improve the FPV video signal.
And I'm going to avoid flying in that place again
Not to encounter Karen again is really a sad situation to be involved in.
I hope you like this video and I'll see you in the next project.