I tried charging the parrot drone batteries on the quick charger which gave an error, and then using the parrot charger over night. The first battery would light the lights and let me connect to WiFi but not the app. The other battery would let me fly a little but gave battery warning at 6%. So are these bad batteries?
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The batteries are bad I ran into this when trying ti myself though it sounds as they have gotten worse, I still got 30 seconds of flight. I asked Romeo to get us some new batteries but to no avail. I am sure he has been busy in personal life so I gave up on it till I had the time and money to just but a couple my self.
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Ok they’re about $30 I wouldn’t mind maybe if a few of us pitched in like $5? My nano qx I just need some AA’s for my transmitter and I’m ok with people on loan.
http://www.amazon.com/Parrot-AR-Drone-Battery-LiPo-Replacement/dp/B0041G5Y8W
Also is there any purpose to that PC in the aerospace area? Is there a R/C flight simulator program or receiver hookup so we could at least play with the simulator?
Yes there is supposed to be I have never used it though.
More than that, there is a simulator (x-plane) and a ground control station (mission planner) and a UAV flight controller, and it’s rigged to perform hardware-in-the-loop control over the virtual plane (with command and control via the futaba radio, and via the ground control software)
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I think I meant if RealFlight simulator is on there so I can practice flying. I guess X-plane is just a interesting but can you do R/C models in X-plane?
There are a few RC aircraft in x-plane by default, and many more that can be downloaded and installed. The model loaded for use with the UAV simulator is one of my own creation, an EasyStar/Bixler clone at 1.7 scale, which very accurately replicates flight characteristics of that RC aircraft, when configured as an UAV (including drag from the payload)
A couple of people have threatened to provide RealFlight and controller for loading/use, but I haven’t seen it yet. There has also been talk of a second PC dedicated for that purpose, but I don’t think we’re seeing much use of the one we have there now…
I’ve been considering pulling it back, and reworking it. I’ve been considering adding functionality, perhaps making it into a general aviation flight trainer (x-plane, when configured in specific ways can be certified by the FAA to log flight hours towards general aviation, not my intent, but since that is so, one can use it for informal flight training…)
I haven’t seen the interest yet.
I’ve also had some need to pull it entirely and use it for image processing. We’ve been getting mission data from NTDUG and texas-based search and rescue teams, and this is my only PC that can process the imagery in reasonable times. I’ve been crunching the data using laptops, but it takes many, many hours. This PC is purpose built for advanced number crunching and graphics display (and flight simulation)
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@MichaelPursifull I have a laptop set up for Microsoft Flight Sim X and a set of yoke, rudder, and throttle controls set up for practice and instruction I plan to bring up every now and then as a STEM kit I received for aerospace instruction.
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Open up the deceased batteries and see what kind of cells they are using…the Amazon link says 3 cells…if they are 18650 cells, you could get some good cells out of an old laptop battery and using the new spot welder in the Electronics lab, you could build a good one for next to free.
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@MichaelPursifull Would you mind offering a guide or training on the HITL setup?
And for the AR. Drone, I believe we can use standard LiPos if we use a different connector.
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It was always my intent to provide a guide; the environment was built there at DMS. It differs from what I typically use in that:
- it’s on windows
- it has the physical flight instruments
- they ports used by the agent that drives the instruments seems to com flight with the simulation ports, so there is this weird dance one does when launching of swapping ports
- I never get to DMS to document in-situ
- I am lame
The basics are:
Read the ArduPilot mission planner guide on simulation available from diydrones
Launch x-plane
Launch Mission Planner
In mission planner, connect to the flight controller
In mission planner, simulation, select x-plane radio button and start simulation link. If it throws an port already in use exception, stop the link, go to x-plane, and data connections, and change the 49005 port to 49004 (or 3, or 6) and do the same in mission planner under simulation/settings - only change the 45005 port, not the three others.
Start simulation link in mission planner.
Observe that mission planner should populate data for attitude, GPS, throttle
Turn on radio transmitter
Observe that throttle changes populate throttle in
In x-plane, select “get me lost”
Switch flight modes, try stabilize.
program the flight controller and have adventures
The system is due for an upgrade. I plan to upgrade the firmware and swap the flight controller to better hardware, if it gets use.
And I need to move mission planner to a no-frozen disk to allow for single app upgrades and log retention.
But this is kinda off topic with the thread?
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