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I have found a lot of resources on building your own quadcopter(drone)...but none on micro helicopters. The only helicopter resources I have found were large model helicopters. However I want to replace the electronics of helicopters the size of my palm like Blade Nano S3 or Blade 70S and flash it with firmware from Arducopter or iNAV. They essentially just have a main rotor, a tail rotor and optionally a couple of linear servos.

I tried my best to search for FCs specific to helicopters...but I could not find any. Even though I will purchase one of the said helicopters...I want to modify them and use Open TX on my Radiomaster TX16S controller with my Crossfire or EXLRS receiver to control my helicopter instead of using the vendor provided controller and the inbuilt rx.

Hence, I wanted to ask if anyone has been able to run helicopters with FCs that are designed for nano quadcopters (F4045 or F745 Mamba or Holybro stacks) with micro helicopters using either Arducopter or iNAV?

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  • $\begingroup$ Look into motor/servo mixing. You'll likely treat it as a "fixed wing" due to the limitation of servos in multirotor mixing modes (protocols etc). You'll want to write your own custom mix that moves the servos to react to the gyro. Primitive "turn left and go forward, turn right and go backwards" helicopters will require some ingenuity here. $\endgroup$
    – Brydon Gibson
    Commented Aug 3, 2021 at 13:53

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I managed to get SPRACINGF3EVO BRUSHED, flashed with custom INAV firmware to work with Eachine E119 helicopter. I got the pitch and roll servo working (correction move from gyro and input), and the motor (main and tail) also work. But unfortunately cannot continue to flight test, because one of the servo burnt (misconfigured PWM frequency). So, i think it's highly possible to do so with your stack, as long it's capable of outputting servo compatible PWM (1000us - 2000us, 333hz max)

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