Repairs and FPV Setup

While repairing the crash damage to the Carbon-Copter I decided to do a more scientific investigation into the differences between carbon and aluminium…

10mm x 10mm Carbon square tube weighs about 0.5g/cm while aluminium bar of the same dimensions (purchased from B&Q) is just slightly under 1g/cm.  That makes the maths easy - 150cm of bar needed for the carbon quad means a 75g difference between carbon and aluminium - which isn’t that bad.

Aluminium is cheaper and seems to be more crash-resistant too, plus I can pop over the road at lunchtime to buy some as opposed to ordering it from China.  So, I made up a complete set of parts using each material.

With the ‘copter repaired I concentrated on setting up the FPV gear.  Sadly, I broke my little FPV camera - I think I caught a screwdriver on some of the components and shorted something.  It was only a tenner but I am still quite cross with myself for not taking enough care.

Anyway, I have the GoPro which can also output video for FPV use.  There’s a slight lag (less than half a second probably) in the video feed which makes it a bit weird and since I’m not willing to drill the waterproof case the camera has to fly “naked” which is a little riskier.  On the plus side, many people report success with exactly the setup pictured below:

The garden isn’t the ideal place for testing with fences and walls in every direction, but my darling wife was kind enough to snaps some pics of the video feed on the garage telly while I had a nose over the neighbour’s fence flying line-of-sight.

The feed was a little noisy but a lot of that is going to be due to the fact that the signal had to get through the garage roof.  Penetration is not good on 5.8GHz signals.  Need to sort out something a bit more portable and pop over to Dr J’s house for more testing this week.  Watch this space!