iXce’s blog

Here is one more hacking story, mixing 3D printers with the discovery of an awesome hobby: RC modelling.

TL;DR: Euromodel sucks, HobbyKing sort-of rocks, get an integrated IMU, watch our printed hexacopter teaser video

While coming back from the 2011 French Robotics Cup, we were discussing what project we could tackle next, and after making something that runs it quickly appeared that we had to make something that flies. We were willing to make something super stable, which could possibly go autonomously to a given GPS position (so an airplane was not an option) and we knew about Parrot’s AR Drone (a bluetooth-controlled quad-copter), so we decided to make something bigger: a hexacopter, which is a multicopter with 6 propellers.

We thus headed to the closest modelling shop (namely Euromodel near Gare de Lyon in Paris), nicely explained our needs and bought a batch of brushless motors, controllers, 8″ propellers, LiPo batteries and a LiPo charger as advised by the vendor. Using the dimensions of the motors, we designed the first version of our hexacopter, aimed for 3D printing:

Initial hexacopter design

The whole point of the design was to make something super sturdy, which would protect propellers from crashes. Traditional mutlicopters use a star-shaped design, where thin carbon fiber (or similar) arms stand out of a central frame, but we thought that materializing the hexagon and adding extra shells around the propellers would allow the drone to handle crash forces in a much more uniform way.

However, this design had a bunch of flaws that we hadn’t foreseen. The first one is that each part was fairly big, despite splitting the design quite a lot already (each propeller cylinder is split in two parts, and we could not split it more with the current design). The largest one was barely fitting the print bed of our Mendel printer (the part smallest bounding box was about 21cm*21cm), but was too big for my Prusa’s bed. Indeed, this is the first place where the vendor was not super nice: 8″ props are *huge*, but he claimed it was fairly hard to get smaller ones (and now that I’ve heard of HobbyKing, I definitely know this was a big, big lie). Another flaw is that the propeller protections were placed at the level of the engines, and not around the propeller which would be above the engines.

Given these flaws and given that our Mendel broke 3 days after we started printing this initial design (and that fixing it was beyond our motivation), we had to rework it to significantly shrink it to be able to print it on some other printer. We simply removed most of the outer shells, gaining a couple of centimeters, and removed the inner propeller shells, which were now useless. We also added a proper central electronics block with appropriate connections to the outer frame:

hackEns hexacopter Mark II

After pulling a few all-nighters to print the frame, the real issues with the hardware we had bought at Euromodel started to appear. Crap. It was complete crap, especially the speed controllers, which were cheap, now-discontinued models sold with some airplane sometimes in the past. We burnt a couple of them and still don’t know why they burnt, and burnt a few motors. One of the motors died because of another flaw of the original design, coupled with a flaw of the 3D printer: the inner diameter of the tubes holding the motors was a little bit too small (and the 3D printer was printing the circles even smaller than they were meant to be), and on one of them the motor got stuck while trying to spin, which lead to its death, producing a beautiful-yet-frightening orange-ish smoke.

The beast being assembled

Sadly we had invested a bunch of money on this, and buying a whole new set of motors and controllers would have been too expensive (at least we thought so, once again, we did not really know about HobbyKing at the time), so we bought replacements. We bought the last two controllers Euromodel had, and bought replacement brushless motors from the US, and after a few more adjustments, discoveries, and fiddling with the electronics (such as painfully figuring out our ESC were only accepting 50Hz PWM input), we got it to leave the ground !

As you can see on the video, we had mounted a GoPro on the copter, which made really nice looking videos of the Cour Pasteur at ENS
Sadly, after just a few days, we broke it again, breaking two of the twelve arms that form the hexagon shape (damn, we knew the outer shells would have been useful, and we knew I’m a very, very unskilled RC flyer). We now need to either reprint new parts or modify the design to make it even sturdier.

Anyway, we also learnt that building such a machine is not all about designing the copter, printing the parts and assembling them. Flying a drone requires a very, very good flight control unit and sensors (and RC skills, but well, you can’t buy that). We initially planned to go super light and use an Arduino Nano plus a Wiimote-based sensor array, namely using the accelerometers from a Nunchuk and the gyroscopes from a Wii Motion Plus extension following the MultiWii models. As the Nano board was really too Nano, providing too few pins to be convenient enough, we ended up flying the MultiWii control software on a Flyduino Mega (an Arduino Mega fitted in a MikroKopter-compliant 5cm*5cm board (with 4.5cm spaced mounting holes)) and these sensors. The MultiWii software is an open source flight control system originally designed for AVR platforms such as Arduino. It’s a really cool piece of software, with an awesome community and a lot of good momentum, a bunch of tutorials and nice graphical tools.

We initially had a lot of stability issues, which were partially fixed by tuning the PID parameters. We could never completely get rid of all the issues, and eventually found out that our they were most likely due to the sensor boards not being properly lined up and stable in their mountings (i.e. the gyroscope board was not perfectly flat and parallel to the accelerometer board). We ended up ordering a FreeIMU board (which combines a 3-axis accelerometer, a 3 axis gyroscope, a barometer and a magnetometer, plus a sensor fusion device which processes all the readings), which seems to provide a much, much better signal than our original assembly according to the tests we made, though we could not field-test it as it arrived after the “final” crash. But we’ll fly it FreeIMU as soon as we repair the mechanical breakages, hopefully for the best

To conclude, if I were to conduct another such project, I’d probably directly jump onto using a proper IMU such as FreeIMU (or at least something well integrated on a single board), buy stuff from HobbyKing (they now have two warehouses directly in Europe, and shipping from Hong Kong is just a matter of patience) instead of spending hundreds of euros on crappy hardware (our crappy 15amps ESCs were 40€, HobbyKing has nice 30amps ones for less than 15€ in the German warehouse…) and would definitely reuse a MultiWii-based control platform (open source rocks, and the community is *great*).