From my last flight, I ended up with a slightly puffed lipo battery, I am a bit concerned. 
Is it possible to catch fire in flight? Or is it only dangerous when when charging?

is it dangerous when it's not charging or discharging, e.g. is it likely that a LiPo battery can catch fire during storage?

Hi guys, 

I have seen A few people have problem with throttle, where the quad just doesn't level when it's going up, although they have done ESC calibration many times correctly.

And then some people suggest to make sure in BLHeliSuite settings, the PPM min and max  values should match up (the same) on all 4 ESC's..... 

I cannot find much info about this and would like to learn more, can someone explain the process and the reasons for doing it? or can anyone help a layman understand how and why its done please.

Sunnysky has just released a new motor called the Edge R2206 2380KV motor Racing Edition

Build quality looks great. I'm also digging that hex screw at the bottom versus traditional C/E-clips that either fly off or get damaged when removing. Sooo many motor choices nowadays!

It kind of looks like a mix of Emax red bottom motor and T-motors

   

Price is about $12 each, and they comes with CW and CCW motor in pair (I personally hate that, only want CW!! )

With Gemfan 5045 4S it can generate 810 grams of thrust at 19A current.

Cleanflight creator is releasing a new board: Seriously Pro Racing F3 Mini Flight Controller (SPRacingF3Mini)

I think they realized onboard flash memory is too limited for blackbox, so they built in SD card slot for logging and that was a good move, same with the race transponder, the board can finally live up to its name.
No extra voltage regulator means a cleaner build.
And no more annoying JST-SH connectors, everything else gets real through-holes. MUCH better design than the original.

But I hope that it is strong enough to take a hit without breaking given there are so many holes.
Seems to be FAR better than the original SPRacing in terms of features as well as getting rid of the micro connectors. If it turns out to be reliable (not randomly conking out like the original), I may get one.

   

Some of the features that caught my eyes:


Race Timing Transponder

The SPRacingF3Mini is the first and only mini board that features a race transponder system for recording your lap times. Each board comes with a special transponder code to identify you at race events. Compatible with i-LAP receiver systems. Two LEDs for clockwise and anti-clockwise race tracks.

This gives me ideas

TPA stands for: Throttle PID Attenuation in Betaflight and Cleanflight.

TPA basically allows an aggressively tuned multi-rotor (one that feels very locked in) to reduce its PID gains when throttle is applied beyond the TPA threshold/breakpoint in order to eliminate fast oscillations – What a mouthful!!

Take the following example: You’re flying around quite happily but you want to punch out(throttle up quickly) to gain some altitude quickly, as you increase the throttle, you notice that your multi-rotor oscillates rapidly, but it doesn’t in normal conditions. see the video below for an example of what I mean. In this instance, the vibrations are caused by the PIDs being set too high for the amount of power you want to utilize, to resolve this and eliminate the vibrations, you need to apply some TPA.



How do I use TPA?

I am going to assume that you have your throttle endpoints set to 1000 – 2000, with middle stick being 1500. To use TPA, you first will need to assess where your throttle is when you experience the oscillations, mine happened to be just after the mid point, so I set my TPA breakpoint to 1500 (red/blue/green line on the chart below), You may find that you only experience the oscillations later on in your throttle range, e.g. 3/4 throttle. In this instance you can set the TPA breakpoint to 1750 (black dotted line on the graph below).

You can set your TPA breakpoint by going to the CLI and typing:

 
you can substitute 1500 for whichever value you want, but for a mid point, 1500 will suffice (note: by default, cleanflight and Betaflight have 1650 set as the TPA breakpoint)

Once we are happy with where we have set the breakpoint, we can now concentrate on refining the TPA value. I tend to find my TPA value by incrementing by 0.05 or 0.1, depending on how bad the oscillations are. The trick here is to fly around, and throttle up quickly to see/hear if you still have oscillations, If you do, increment the value and try again.

 

Lets follow the blue line first. The PIDs of the quad are at 100% of the values you have tuned them to until the throttle is at 50% (1500). As we increase the throttle, the PIDs will decrease until at full throttle they are 50% of the value of which they were initially set.

Now lets follow the green line where we have set our TPA value to 0.75 (This is actually quite high). 0.75 means that at 100% throttle, our PIDs will be reduced by 75% leaving us with 25% of the values initially set. For example: P for roll is tuned to 4.2 – at full throttle with a TPA of 0.75 this will actually be 1.05.

In Cleanflight and Baseflight you can set your TPA value in the PID tuning tab. TPA in Cleanflight and Baseflight only affects P, I and D on ROLL and PITCH, it does not affect YAW.

Hi everyone,



I'm a multirotors enthusiast and I've been following Oscar blog for the last few months, it was there that I found this forum.
I'm having a strange behavior in my recent build and I would like to know your opinion on the the problem.
I’ve tried different firmwares (cleanflight and betaflight) but I got always the same motor glitching. Currently I’m using cleanflight with default configuration, please check this video for you to see what am I talking about (with sound is better).



My setup:
Emax nighthawk 200
Emax MT2205
LittleBee 20A ESC
Skyline32 FC
Latest Cleanflight firmware

I did a web search but can't find anything similar anywhere...

Today I've noticed two things:
   - the problem is less noticeable if using bullnose propellers! 
   - changing the PWM frequency to LOW in BlHeli suite seems to solve the issue.


Do you ever experienced something similar to this?
Thank you in advance

I've got a eachine PDB and it makes a weird hum noise (sound) when I plug my FPV gear on it, if I unplug the nosie disappear.

Same happened before with my Matek PDB from banggood, I thought it was that PDB, but now it's happening again on this eachine one too.

where is the noise coming from? LC filter? or voltage regulator?

Recently I was put onto a neat little PDB that also has a basic OSD. 

The PowerOSD Pro.

First the Pro's.

Simply plug and play..you do not have to program anything to get the OSD up and running.

Has built in 5 volt regulator to power your FC
Built in Line filter
Also has 10 volt regulator for your fpv gear (the manual states 10V can be used to power cameras labeled as 12V.).
Nice large solder pads for your + and - Lipo leads
Also, it comes with a PAL-NTSC solder bridge on the underside of the PDB to cater for those with PAL or NTSC cameras.

The OSD display:

Flight timer
Two stage battery onscreen alarm and flashes when time to land
Battery volts
System Current draw (amps)
Battery consumption (mAH used)
RSSI reception meter.

The OSD in the goggles is not intrusive at all and provides you with vital information for the free styler/race pilot. ( Some may want a more comprehensive standalone OSD so this may not fit the bill ).





Cons?  none really

But if I was to be nit picking it would be about the ESC solder pads are not very well located.  Whilst both solder points are located on top of the board the + is on one side and the - on the other .

I think for what you get the price of $35 US is pretty good.


Technical specifications: (Sourced directly from suppliers website)
• 3S- 4S battery compatibility
• 100A max current
• 36mm x 36mm size with standard mount pattern
• 5g weight


Big thanks to Rook (forum member here) who sent me this PDB to try out.