Hi Reno,
The SP F3 was given to me as a Christmas present by an old flying friend who is following my quad travails on this forum. It was I must say a very nice surprise and I thank him for it. I take it from your comment that it is suitable only for small racing quads. Is this correct? I must say that it is a nice neat package, well-constructed however with all the shortcomings that I have learned to expect of things DYI quad.
And what have I come to expect from things DIY quad?
I have come to expect things to be presented in a very primitive, dare I say “Geeky” way comparable to the way things were when I started flying R/C aircraft back in 1955.
In those days everything was very difficult. Commercial gear was primitive with most of us building or at least trying to build our own TX and Rx. These were at the time single channel superregen valve Rx and TX which required endless and constant tuning, that is if ever we got them to work in the first place.
Being here in Australia made things doubly difficult and we used to drool over the ads in the overseas magazines showing the latest R/C gear which was invariably not available in Australia due to the difficulty in obtaining overseas currency after the war. Our lifelines at the time were Airline Pilots who could bring stuff in direct and the occasional overseas traveller.
Getting ready for a Sunday flying session involved hours of work, unsoldering the old dry cell batteries and resoldering in new batteries. RX HT 22.5V, LT 1.5V, TX HT 180V and 1.5V LT and woe betide any twit who forgot to cut the end covers of the AA batteries in order to solder directly to the battery end. So onto the field the next day complete with headphones and bending over the model tuning the RX. If you were lucky (or had a good stable RX) putting the wing back on the model did not change the temperature in the cabin enough to detune the RX. To bring a model home in one piece was a real accomplishment and so it went for many a year.
Years followed in which we experimented with all sorts of systems, cascaded escapements, Mighty Midget motor centrifugal servos, Galloping Ghost and so on. Then came the reed sets. By this time even superregen RX were fairly reliable and even superhet RX were beginning to appear on local fields so tuning the RX was replaced with tuning reeds, all 10 of them. Sadly the battery replacement grind still carried on.
During those difficult years it was the help and support of the fellows at the club fields that got us through. It was those fellows who taught me my trade and encouraged me over the all too frequent rough spots. (Just as you fellows on this forum coach and encourage me over the all too frequent rough spots I have encountered flying Wooden IT. However I should not have to scrounge and beg search for help endlessly as I find myself doing at the moment. There has to be a better way than this)
However the reed sets worked very well and some of the nicest flying I saw back then was with reed systems even to the point that good pilots still flying reeds were competitive with Propo pilots.
Then came the real revolution. The first of the modern proportional system began to appear; at first in the hands of Airline pilots and their friends and then in greater numbers through commercial channels. Here was the dream realised. Perfect control with no battery replacement or soldering, no tuning.
NO ANYTHING! Just charge the batteries and go fly. However the best part by far was the fact that bringing home the model was now routine and modern R/C had arrived.
Which now brings me to the point of this story and perhaps the prickly bit. To my mind the DIY quad business is at the point where single channel was back in the 1950s and I hope I am not treading on too many toes by saying this.
Take for example my latest acquisition. The parcel arrived by mail before Christmas with a dire warning that it was not to be opened until Christmas morning. (We are really old fashioned Downunder.) As with all kids I sneaked out in the early hours of Christmas morning and into the workshop only to be confronted with the usual quad mess.
Firstly no instruction sheet included. So onto the web and as it turned out this was quite difficult to locate. I finally located and downloaded a copy of the genuine Cleanflight FC which looks remarkably similar but the manual for my controller took some time longer to locate. Bang went my spare time on Christmas day with no progress except locating and printing out the manual.
Next day came the usual “Must flash new firmware” warning and the agony that accompanies that warning. I found that I could successfully communicate with the FC but could not flash the firmware. So I had a good few hours on the quad today unsuccessfully trying to flash the firmware, update drivers, play with the boot pins, scrounge around watching videos on how it should be done and so on and so on. Again to no avail. So here I am two days later with nothing to show but a print-out of the manual. (Oops I forgot the 15 minutes soldering the pins into the board, a very routine op for an old hand like me. Were all things quad so routine.)
So my point in all of this? Why does the quad not come with an SD card carrying the manual, drivers and a good step by step set-up procedure. Perhaps even a video. That would at least save a lot of time and frustration. Yes it will put the price up a bit but surely it would be worth it.
I know I am not good at this modern computer stuff but in 1978 I wrote the entire software business suite for Silvertone using Dartmouth basic. I used that software for years until the good business programs came on the market so it is not as if I know absolutely nothing about computer programming and I sure am still capable of learning, so why is this quad stuff so difficult?
Gripe session over. (For the moment)
Regards,
KK
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