It’s ALIVE!

Today I understand how Dr. Frankenstein felt as his creation awoke for the first time — Tomorrow I get to find out if it breaks loose and destroys the town.  You see, I was able to get to a point in this whole building thing where I have control over the sucker.  Haven’t actually flown yet as the sun had gone down by the time I had the chance for a maiden flight. I didn’t want to chance taking this 35″ beast inside with my meager flight skills and untrimmed settings as that could make for some broken stuff.

So let me explain… first of all, Friday night I completed the real-life version of my wiring diagram.  I stopped short of adding AUX ports as that’s for future expansion anyway, so I pushed them off too.. well… the future.

Quad Wiring in Real Life

The next step was attaching this to the quad’s frame. My brother Michael came over and helped me out with the setup and we got a lot done.  It started with making sure the motors were all rotating the right way.  You see, two of them have to rotate one way, and the other two have to rotate the other way, and there are two types of propellers too, one for each direction (but you knew all that, right?).

This One Goes Counter-Clockwise

So we hooked one motor up, tested it out.  It came to life. What an awesome moment! It was the first time the thing took instructions from the radio transmitter.  We might have screamed like girls when it started spinning.  Then again, maybe we didn’t.  You weren’t there, you don’t know!  From there it was a matter of routing all of the wires and mounting the controller and receiver, programming the ESCs and making sure the controller was getting as little vibration as possible.

Whew!  Now it was starting look like something that might actually fly. Once we had it all plugged in it was time to see if all of the motors were synced and spinning like they should.  Success!  I know we screamed like girls that time.

Now, at that point it was really tempting to take it outside in the dark and try to see if it’d fly.  But we stopped short of that and instead Michael held it above his head while I gave it some throttle and we played with the controls a bit.

Flight Test! Look at Those Props spin!

Everything seems to be in working order so far.  Although I know once I try  to take to the skies I’ll have to do some trimming and tweaking to help with stabilization.  Oh, and there’s a bit more frame to make as the landing gear isn’t attached yet, and the bottom battery carrier isn’t made. But all of that is for another day.  For now, my monster is ALIVE!!!

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