10
votes
Accepted
Can a receiver get damaged if you power it up without an antenna?
Running a receiver without an antenna should not cause any damage to the receiver, as no RF power is sent to the antenna (if your receiver has an active antenna there may be a DC bias present, but ...
- 6,081
7
votes
Accepted
What would a basic fixed-wing electronic setup look like?
The main things you need are a motor, battery, electronic speed controller (ESC) and servos.
The ESC sits between the battery and motor, and it also has a thinner cable that goes to the receiver. The ...
- 7,418
7
votes
Accepted
How do you build and use a smoke stopper?
There are different ways, but a common one is to put a light bulb in series with the positive battery lead.
This works because it will allow low currents through to power the flight controller, but ...
- 4,432
5
votes
What are the usual engineering considerations for a UAV current sensor?
Is the shunt resistor usually mounted high-side (i.e. at the positive battery terminal), or low-side (at the negative terminal), and why? Does it matter?
There should be no significant difference ...
- 6,081
5
votes
Accepted
How to prevent a 5V supply from sagging to 4.6V when the FPV camera is on?
I've pulled a few specs together from the parts you linked to:
Flight controller:
Input: 2S to 6S LiPo (7V to 20V)
Output: 5V 3A
VTX:
Input: 7V to 24V
Output: 5V 0.3A
Camera:
Input: 5V 0.65A --...
- 6,081
4
votes
Accepted
Quality of transmitted image and electrical problems
There’s a lot to unpack here, so I’m going to give a general kind of advice that should be helpful for anyone trying to get cleaner video:
Electrical Power
There are two main aspect to the image ...
- 4,432
4
votes
How do you build and use a smoke stopper?
A small scale power supply with over-current protection also works well.
The type to get are little cheap build yourself units, with a display that allows you to adjust output voltage and display ...
- 301
4
votes
How do you build and use a smoke stopper?
There are two problems to mitigate here - incorrect polarity and overcurrent - which have different solutions but can be used together.
To protect against a battery being connected backwards you need ...
- 6,081
4
votes
Accepted
How do you waterproof your electronics?
The first step I take to help protect my gear from shorting out from water is to apply silicone conformal coating to all the electronics I can. I cover the ESC, flight controller, vtx, and any other ...
- 1,160
4
votes
What would a basic fixed-wing electronic setup look like?
Summary
The necessary electronic components: Transmitter & receiver, ESC, motor, servos. (yes, it really is that simple)
How they are linked together: basically; battery plugs into ESC input, ...
- 5,802
4
votes
What would a basic fixed-wing electronic setup look like?
The image below shows a fairly basic fixed wing electronic configuration. Depending on your design you might not need it all, and for more complicated builds with flaps and retractable gear you would ...
- 6,081
3
votes
Amperage of FC, ESC
However, sometimes I see in OCD far beyond 5A and 6A. ... Shouldn't they burn down?
This is the difference between a rating for continuous, burst, and instantaneous current flow:
Continuous: maximum ...
- 6,063
3
votes
Is my flight controller dead or can I save it?
Something similar happened to me only with a different cause, my quad crashed and the omnibus f4 v2 fried itself in the logic side but it could still power the esc and the 5v pads. So, I think sadly ...
- 151
2
votes
What are the usual engineering considerations for a UAV current sensor?
Using PM07 power management board from Holybro as an example. They use shunt resistor on the high side. Voltage across the shunt resistor is then fed into the Texas Instruments INA169 current sense ...
- 411
2
votes
Serial Communication Not working in APM 2.8
There are a bunch of problems which need to be overcome when using the RPi GPIO serial port.
The RPi normally runs a login process on the serial port, this will need to be disabled.
...
- 629
1
vote
Accepted
Why does ELRS use only radio modules with SPI control and UART?
It turns out ELRS requires way higher communication protocol rates. So that's why they use SPI at multiple MGhz rates.
What's more, those UART modules are not really UART natively. I've dissambled one ...
- 21
1
vote
Accepted
Amperage of FC, ESC
sometimes I see in OCD far beyond 5A and 6A
Those specs are probably per motor, so 4 motors could pull 20A.
And I think you mean OSD, for On Screen Display.
1c = 12 A
Nope, 1200mAh is 1.2A, so 1c ...
- 7,418
1
vote
Accepted
What are controllers of Parrot AR drone 2?
After reading relevant materials, i think I have find the answers for this question.
Q1:Since AR drone2 is a proprietary system, this company didn't publish any documentation about the internal ...
- 61
1
vote
Accepted
FPV camera and beeper seems to be interfering with each other
The problem was indeed the 5V regulator. I bought an external 5V 1.2A regulator and hooked up the camera and VTX to it, and all my problems have disappeared.
- 2,674
1
vote
How to prevent a 5V supply from sagging to 4.6V when the FPV camera is on?
I am not an electronics expert, but it sounds like it is a problem with the voltage regulator and as such, adding a capacitor wouldn’t solve the problem.
I would suggest you try running the camera ...
- 4,432
1
vote
How do you waterproof your electronics?
As mentioned a conformal coating is what you need. There are various types and methods of application. I haven't personally used this product, but it does look like the best and easiest:
https://...
- 356
1
vote
How do you waterproof your electronics?
Just to add some extra info to the other good answer, there are liquid products specifically for coating PCB's. They come with a small brush for easy application and you can easily solder through the ...
- 439
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