Over the weekend, I finally have repaired the broken ESC (see “Kinetis Drone: Graupner ESC S3055 Failure“). Time to run some first test flights :-).

Kinetis Drone Flying Tests

Initially I had a problem that the rotation direction of two motors were inverse :-(. Easily fixed that with swapping the wires to the brushless DC motors.I have tied the FRDM-K22F with electrical isolation tape on the top of the copter:

Kinetis Drone taped together

Below is a video of some tests in-house, carefully driving the motors.

After that, I did some tests outside with higher motor speeds. To keep things safe, I tied the quadrocopter down to the ground (and this was really a good idea ;-)).

Copter Tied to the Ground

Below is a short video:

Summary

The hardware is working, the Graupner remote control is communicating to the FRDM-K22F. I need to think about a better wiring of the FRDM-K22F board with the servos, right now electrical tape is keeping things together. For now, the control loop is very rough and not fine tuned yet. I need to improve that, and I plan to write some articles about the control loop and PID.

Happy Flying 🙂

Links

• Freescale FRDM-K22F Board: http://www.freescale.com/products/arm-processors/kinetis-cortex-m/k-series/k2x-usb-mcus/freescale-freedom-development-platform-for-kinetis-k22-mcus:FRDM-K22F
• Freescale FRDM-STBC-AGM01 Board: http://www.freescale.com/tools/embedded-software-and-tools/hardware-development-tools/freedom-development-boards/frdm-stbc-agm01-9-axis-inertial-measurement-sensor-board:FRDM-STBC-AGM01
• Assembling the Quadrocopter frame: “Kinetis Drone: Frame Construction with Graupner Race Copter Alpha 250 Q“
• Using Electronic Speed Controllers: Kinetis Drone: Driving the Electronic Speed Controllers
• Decoding the SUMD Protocol: Kinetis Drone: Remote Controller with SUMD
• Freescale Sensor Fusion Toolbox: Kinetis Drone: Sensor Fusion Toolbox
• Graupner Race Copter Alpha 250 Q: https://www.graupner.com/