Blog on Craig Perry

Nighthawk 280 Setup Part 1

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 22:55:00 +0000

Here’s how I setup my EMAX Nighthawk 280 Pro with the latest version of Cleanflight and tuned the PIDs).

Posts In This Series

Setting Up Cleanflight on an EMAX Nighthawk 280 Pro
Flashing the ESCs with BLHeli and configuring for best performance
Adding VBAT battery monitoring and a buzzer
Adding a blackbox data recorder, configuring it, making video overlays & accurately tuning your PIDs
Adding a MicroMinim OSD (On Screen Display)

Cleanflight

The EMAX Nighthawk 280 usually comes with the Baseflight flight control firmware installed but it’s also compatable with the Cleanflight and Betaflight firmwares.

Pelican Hosting on AppEngine

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 20:15:00 +0000

Google App Engine (GAE) hosting is fast! Here’s how i setup my blog using the Pelican static site generator and deployed it on Google AppEngine.

Install Pelican & AppEngine

First I created an empty git repo. Then i created a Python virtualenv to host Pelican and the AppEngine SDK. This saves polluting my system with particular versions of pelican and appengine since i might want to use other versions in other projects.

My First 3D Design

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 19:41:00 +0000

The EMAX Nighthawk Pro 280 racing quadcopter has its power distribution & control board exposed underneath the quad. It is conformally coated but that’s not enough so I designed and 3D printed a protective underplate.

Measuring Up

I traced the outline of the power distribution board (PDB) on paper. Then i added some straight lines to make measuring the odd shape easier.

OpenSCAD

I’ve been playing with SketchUp, 123Design and OpenSCAD. I chose the latter here since this job is mostly transferring some measurements to CAD and adding a couple of small design ideas.

NASA 3D Printed Wrench

Sat, 26 Dec 2015 11:26:00 +0000

To test out my new Lulzbot Mini i printed the Nasa 3D wrench.

It ratchets in the clockwise direction only but it prints as a fully functioning part. It’s stronger than the rated 3in-lbs.

It wasn’t all plain sailing though, this being my first ever 3D print, it was a good learning curve.

I didn’t fully print all of these, i could tell early on if it was going to work or not.

Quadrifilar Helix Antenna

Sat, 26 Dec 2015 00:27:00 +0000

I followed Andrew McNeil’s design for a 5.8GHz Quadrifilar Helix Antenna. This was to replace a crappy omni whip antenna that came with an RC852 video rx.

I ordered some semi rigid coax from ChinaRF on eBay and I used some earth wire from some scrap 2C+E i had laying around. I tried to straighten it as best i could!

Bending the shape of the lobes was harder than expected. I posted on reddit and someone suggested using a 3D Printer to create a jig. One for the future i think!

Quanum Googles v1

Fri, 25 Dec 2015 23:41:00 +0000

Hobby king were doing a deal on Quanum v1 headsets. I figured i could repurpose the screen if i didn’t like them.

I’m pleased to say they worked out really cheaply!

20GBP Quanum v1 from Hobby King
12GBP RC832 5.8GHz Video Rx from Bang Good
2GBP GoPro headstrap from eBay

To make this setup, I drilled 2 holes in the back of the Quanum screen’s rear case then bolted the RC832 5.8GHz video receiver to it. I moulded a little epoxy putty around them to make it look like this is the way the product was designed all along. Instead of the very poor head strap supplied with the Quanums, I used a GoPro head mount. I eliminated all the cabling except for a short power cord.

HC06 Bluetooth Module

Thu, 17 Dec 2015 01:51:00 +0000

The HC06 is the same hardware as HC05 but has fewer features. JY-MCU is written on the rear of HC06 modules.

Connecting To The Serial Port

These devices are 3.3v only. The wiring is straightforward:

Serial Adapter	HC06
3.3v	Vcc
Gnd	Gnd
Tx	Rxd
Rx	Txd

The state pin emits the same pattern as the red led and can be used to detect current status. The key pin is unused.

CP2102 and Arduino

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 21:01:00 +0000

There are 4 main USB to Serial chips sold on eBay:

Genuine FTDI, rare and most expensive. Has the best drivers.
Fake FTDI, common and cheap. Shares the best drivers.
CP2102, common and cheap. Now has good drivers on all platforms
CH340G, ultra cheap and currently has terrible drivers although it’s still quite new so this may change

To connect a CP2102 to an Arduino Pro Mini:

CP2102	Arduino
5v / 3.3v	Vcc
Txd	Txd
Rxd	Rxd
GND	GND
DTR	DTR

NB: the pinouts are confusing here, i’d expect Txd to connect to Rxd and vice versa. Similarly i’d expect DTR to be labelled RTS. The above is correct on my version of the cp2102 but it did cause me some consternation to find this!

Unbricking FTDI Chips with Vagrant

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 20:45:00 +0000

Some fake FTDI chips had their Product ID reset by old FTDI drivers from 0x6001 to 0x0000 which rendered them unusable. It’s possible to reprogram the Product ID string and the modern FTDI drivers no longer make this change. I used Vagrant to create a linux virtual machine for this:

vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64
vagrant up

I plugged the FTDI in to my host. I opened the virtualbox GUI and assigned this USB device to the VM. The required USB drivers are not present in this image, so i added them:

ESP8266 Arduino

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 19:18:00 +0000

The Software

The Arduino environment can be used to program ESP8266 WiFi boards. To configure the Arduino IDE v1.6.5 or newer, go to File -> Preferences and add the following Additional Boards Manager URL: http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json

Then go to Tools -> Board -> Boards Manager. Install the latest esp8266 board manager.

Libraries

Available libraries include HTTP servers, mDNS / Bonjour & SSDP service discovery alongside any other Arduino libraries which don’t make use of native ATMEL hardware functions.

Hexo with Github Pages

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 22:06:00 +0000

There are 3 steps to configuring the hexo static site generator to use a custom domain while hosting on Github Pages:

Create A Git Repo
Configure Hexo
Configure DNS

Lastly there’s some notes on how to use this setup.

Create A Git Repo

Create an empty repo named your-github-username.github.io on the Github site. Next, create a git repository to upload there:

[user@host ~]$ git init github-username.github.io
[user@host ~]$ cd github-username.github.io
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ touch .gitignore
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git add .gitignore
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git commit 'Initial Commit'
[user@host github-username.github.io]$ git remote add origin ssh://git@github.com:Your-Github-Username/your-github-username.github.io.git

There will be 2 branches in the repo: