Now I understand why blade guards are dangerous!
So it crashed and it broke. I was a sad panda but I ordered a new frame and got it yesterday afternoon. The frame arm broke after having hit my grape vine with the blade guard which then got hung up. I tried to cut the motors but ended up having to pull the battery connection to cut the power. Because the motors were still on the blade hit something and the arm snapped.
I had to un-solder the connections on the ESCs to get the motors off the arms. Each ESC is encased in a pc of shrink tubing so that had to be pulled back to allow access to the solder points.
Since it was broken I figured it was worth a try to fix the broken frame with a bit of 2 part epoxy. To my surprise it has setup and become very strong.
The epoxy is strong enough that I can flex the other non-broken arms the same range I can the repaired arm. The slight bit of excess epoxy should be fine and not cause in imbalance.
The new frame with control board, motors, and ESCs all in. I had mostly stripped the parts from the broken frame on Monday so the change over was fairly quick.
I love how simple the mechanisms and parts of the drone are. It makes my mind go wild on various builds I would like to do.
All put back together and looking good. Now I am not going to be using the blade guards except for planned low level flying. I have too many trees around that I am pretty sure I would just get them hung up again, so it's better to leave em off most of the time. I have now put the tall landing gear back on to allow for landing with the camera on, other wise I have to hand catch.
Here is a clip of the video from the first flight after the repairs. It popped right up into the air and did pretty well with the pano shot.
The flight went well and I got 7 minutes of flying before the low battery alarm came on. I brought the drone back and ran low level runs and hovered to test how long the alarm would sound before the battery fully died. 5 to 6 minutes is my max on the low battery alarm, so I ended up with 14 minutes of flight time on my smaller 1800 mAh battery.
Now I have epoxy setting on the battery compartment. The camera housing attaches to the battery compartment with 2 rails. After a hard landing the camera popped off and broke one rail, so I epoxied it up really well and am just waiting for it to cure enough to go back out and fly.
Check out my blog @flemingfarm
Fleming Family Farm
FLEMING FAMILY FARM, LLC
Sustainable & Organic Methods | Heirloom Produce
All images are original works of Fleming Family Farm unless otherwise notated and credited.
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