DeaconEye Lives!

So, after a long wait with a lot of hours of labor and a significant amount of cursing (p=0.00001), DeconEye has returned to the skies. Today I put together a new power distribution system, which I am dubbing the octopus (although it really has 18 arms, 8 power and ground to each motor along with an accessory power lead), and got everything ready to fly. I calibrated all ESCs, changed the necessary settings in MK Tool to get it playing nicely with the new I2C-PWM converter, made sure the motors were all spinning the right way, and got the props balanced on the motors. I also checked to see if the problems with the compass heading varying wildly had been resolved by replacing the old ESCs, and it indeed was. You can see a picture from immediately before the flight below.

With all the details attended to, I took her out for a flight. As soon as I got in the air I could tell we had made the right choice. Everything was superb, it flew as expected at all time, was extremely stable, handled rapid descent very well (I think better than with the old ESCs), and behaved excellently in position hold and altitude hold. At this time I see no need for any additional tuning to get it flying well, it is in excellent flying condition. Return to level when the sticks are released is a little sluggish, but I'm not sure it wasn't that way before and the snappy hexacopter just changed my expectations. My laptop was acting up, so I wasn't able to do any waypoint flight, but from what I saw in position hold, carefree, and altitude hold, I have no reason to expect any problems.

There are, however, 2 significant differences from the old system which I will note: the motor idle speed had to be raised and is double what it was before, and the aircraft now hovers at slightly over half-throttle (55-60%). The first issue comes with the new ESCs but I will work on the second to get the hover back at half throttle (probably by doing a simple travel adjust on the transmitter). I plan to spend next week getting a significant amount of flight time to make sure everything is as good as it seems and then it will be time to get some footage of fall colors on campus.