Heya Forum, I owe you this after I've been going on and on with my noob-talk about the Helix! 

Built it last night, slept a couple of hours and headed out onto the field to *finally* do some proper PID-setup-work.
Realized in the process that I haven't had a clue of what I was doing so far. Thank you all for shoving the PID-subject straight into my face, I really needed some activating energy..
Just copying settings is for nitwits, I see now. Before one actually "starts from zero" at least once and witnesses the progress and the alterations deriving from ever so small changes in PID-setups, one basically has no idea of what the FC is doing.
Along the evolution of the settings I got across "familiar sounds" I recently attributed completely elsewhere (..e.g. to the motors, the esc, the FC itself..), and now I realise that it just was a confused or battling FC because of nonsense-PID-settings..
*it's a bit embarassing, I have to admit, but I stand sort of naked in front of this forum anyway,
so let me present my apologies if I have repeatedly pestered you with my ignorance in the past. I am pretty confident that I will continue to do so on other occasions, btw. It is my Italian nature  
Ok, let's get to the meat:
 

It's a 6-inch Helix frameset with 7-inch warpquad arms. The fairings require drilling & thread cutting, if you want to keep them. I personally love them, they keep the build very clean and the quad sort of "hovers" while standing on them.
So fit the fairings with a screw and mark the spot where the hole should go. Don't forget to check which side it goes on (congruent motor holes) - I did 

In order to drill the 2.8mm holes, I fixed a vacuum cleaner tube with a Lipo-strap onto my lil'drill..


I rounded the edges of the carbon inside a bowl of water in order to prevent dust. I reserve my lungs to smoking..


Despite this looking very cool, I have to admit that I've chickened out on the original idea of mounting F80-motors (..just got the 2500 (!) KV-version, because they were such a bargain @ ImpulseRC. Putting them to the test on the thrust stand, I sacrificed 2 ESC's in order to convince myself that 7-inch props AND 2500KV weren't a good idea on these motors. I could have managed with, say, 50A ESC's, but that would only have postponed the problem to the batteries, flight time and handling. Only because you have heaps of power doesn't mean you're going to have fun with it, I figured. I reminded myself of good old Newton & inertia, and the fact that 7-inch props sit on long arms. So the lever would have accentuated the weight of the motors, and i doubt that it would have served the purpose of such a nimble, elegant and lightweight aircraft as the Helix well..



As many of you have witnessed, I celebrate my addiction to this new hobby all-the-way. I consacrate pretty much everything to it, and what has been stated elsewhere in the forum holds very true for me too: it's a collector's hobby.  
I had gotten some "old-fashioned" 2206 2100 KV cobra competition-motors with my first 6 inch Helix frame @ ImpulseRC. I really believe the boys when they state that they want to serve the hobby with fair prices, as what they offer always is very qualitative and priced as reasonable as ever possible. I got those motors @ 12,99 USD a piece. I thought that was just incredible..
However: These motors are GREAT for those beloved 6045 Dalprops!! I have to admit that the props bread very easily
But they look and sound just great. Efficiency of those motors is incredible, full throttle they don't even hit 30A (in flight), despite the insane prop specs. Of course the thrust is just half of what the F80's produce, but one has to consider that they weigh in at almost half of them and peak out at way less than half current!
Low throttle to mid range is smooth, silent and even more efficient. Those motors aren't supposed to be "last generation", apparently, but on the other hand 7-inch props are not exactly the very last development of miniquad-tech  and the task they're asked to fulfill is an old-school one. The punch-outs today (LOS, setting up PIDs..) were darn fast enough for me. One can't expect to slam around that aircraft like a 5-inch anyway.
But punching it up into the sky with a low-pitched roar and gliding back close to the ground at high speed with almost no throttle and noise at all is priceless. Really, priceless (..to me, at least, with all those diffident frustrated Swiss dog owners around me critizing despite the road behind me being 10 times as loud..). It's such an elegant apparition, this craft.. *aahh..., sigh.
I will post some mounted cam-footage as soon as I finally get the runcam3 (local supplier, yesyes) I ordered eons ago. The mobius is just such a hassle to get onto that cradle.. Well, maybe I'll do it anyway 


The electronics that come with the frameset are the bomb, to my eyes. I just got to fully appreciate them with my second build, finally tackling PIDs. Spend two hours setting up my Taranis with LUA scripts to work around the missing telemetry of my XM+-receiver, had my backpack already rigged with my laptop,
as I found that one can comfortably do the whole dance over the OSD which comes with the Helix. "Easy", as Krazy would say. Easy indeed, little LOS-flight, listen and observe, land, Fatsharks on, tune PIDs, and off we go again. Taught me sooo much about the whole business, truly enlightening!
I started off with the settings that Stingy recommended in his tutorial video on youtube and worked his protocol. Not done yet, but it's gotten a whole lot better than the 6-inch (..I still have to repair ) already!


I tried to keep the build as clean as possible, but mounted some flashy 8-element LEDs instead of the 3-element ones that come with the frame. The FC BEC can stomach them easily.
the cobras are nice and light and smooth and black. 


I mounted a Runcam Swift (..tried the "all black protocol", this time..) which requires the usual little adjustments in order to fit. Since I mounted a wide-angle lens, I omitted the lowest spacer of the vtx-cage, but it already has plenty of stabilization and I don't think it ever will be a problem maybe except for the protruding camera lens.. Still have to try that one! it's a 135 degress, oh my! I'd like to keep a steeper angle, so I figured this could ease the landing process a little..

So that's "her" before PID-setup..


Nice & clean & complete like she'll never be again

And that's her afterwards..:


Did the usual lawn-mowing in the high grass upon the first two landings, but then consistently managed to land on the pad. Except for the last one, as you can tell, when I grew overconfident with the settings and forgot about the added D-values..

This is what my first attempt ended up with, starting from "Stingy-zero":


Hope this was of any use or enjoyment for anyone,
so long and "c ya round"!

Go IntoFPV, Gooooo!!!

That's a very nice looking build! It has a dangerous, 'tactical' look to it with everything in black.

It's interesting that you mention how you can hear when a tune isn't right. To me, the sound a quad makes as it flies is a very obvious indicator of when there is something wrong with the tune. I'm surprised more people don't use the sound as one the important things to evaluate. If you listen properly, you don't need a black box log to tell you that there's something not right.

I'm looking forward to see some flight video from the Helix, if you manage to keep it in one piece long enough!

Meanwhile, have a watch of this video. One thing I've always aspired to is quadmovr's telepathic orientation skills in line of sight acrobatic flying.

Meanwhile, have a watch of this video. One thing I've always aspired to is quadmovr's telepathic orientation skills in line of sight acrobatic flying.



> Thanks, man!
I am surprised @ how the "big Helix" feels, it's reeeaally efficient, when cutting the throttle you get a heap of gliding time, probably not unlike those micro-quads (.."leaves in the wind"..), but you have way more control over the glide. With increasing speed of descent, the props (silently!) spin up like those WWII-fighterplanes, awhilst controls remain crisp and nimble. Love it! :-)

LOS flying is important, despite all polemics. To my eyes, it helps "configuring" some sort of "internal FC" in your mind, and with the learning effect of neuronal connection pathways, the "loop times" decrease, thus the frequency increases.
The guy you showed me must be around 64kHz internal FC
I guess that this biologic FC keeps running when flying FPV, sort of a mental PiP-screen which tells you the position of the aircraft and lets you subtract the bias from the camera angle and an eventually tilted horizon (..e.g. when flying in the mountains).
I am very eager to improve my LOS-flying, as acoustic feedback is obviously better than when transmitted over a cheapo microphone.
When "measuring" my patient's occlusion, I usually use my ears rather than my eyes. Untrained human eyes resolve around 200micrometers, the trained eye maybe a bit less, but with my ears, i can hear 2-4 micrometer differences.
Like listening to the heart beating and being able to tell the functioning of the single valves apart. There happens sort of a Fourier-analysis in the head, and while you get a "heartfelt" impression of what is happening (..it "makes a different sound from what you expect"), these tonal differences resolve milliseconds and - depending on training and the individual "biological setup" - changes in frequency from 0.4-1 Hz/step, which to my eyes is mindboggling!
It is psychologically far more dramatic to lose auditive capacity than to go blind, btw. Our first orientation in space happens over the ears, not the eyes. The baby turns his or her head in the direction of the voice it's listening to, far earlier than having a visual concept of space - just by measuring timing differences of soundwaves hitting the ears.

So long, my Dear,
read you soon and be well!