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..great! I've been having good luck with my latest attempt, that's great news for me

I've been watching the BP ROVs in action the last week and while watching all the video streams from their ROVs over at http://bp.isevil.com/ and hanging out on IRC channel with the rest of the 'BP Oil Leak Peanut Gallery' I've also been working on converting my Reactor Bipe EP to FPV.

The foamies and stuff distracted me for a while for FPV but I finally decided to convert my electrifly reactor biplane. It has a lot of wing, it is fairly light. And last, but not least the last non-FPV flight ended in a tremendous crash which split the fuse in half, ripped off the top wing, tore out wing ribs, etc. I was flying in calm + gust conditions, and right on landing a 15-20mph gust hit me from the side and put it in.

I should have trashed the plane, but instead I collected every single last piece of balsa from the field I could find. I spent a week a while back rebuilding it, cutting out new parts, re-assembling, sanding and stiffening up the plane and re-installing the electronics. After all that effort, the only thing that gives away it's past is my loud mouth and my terrible re-covering job of the damaged sections.

I installed the FPV electronics into the plane and all is going well. I originally had powered the video TX off of the main battery which worked, but put a lot of noise into the video/down link. I've since switched to a 500mAh 3s just for the video and down link and that's working great.

I finally got my back ordered Eagle Eyes antenna tracker, but had some setup problems with it (my fault), so I disabled the servos for the time being. Once the weather is good again I will spend some time re-calibrating it.

The great thing about this plane is that while it can fly fairly fast, it floats into a landing. I've recorded a couple of FPV while flying line-of-sight so that I can review the videos and get an idea of a 'good landing' and other flight characteristics as compared with my normal flying style

..great! I've been having good luck with my latest attempt, that's great news for me

I've been watching the BP ROVs in action the last week and while watching all the video streams from their ROVs over at http://bp.isevil.com/ and hanging out on IRC channel with the rest of the 'BP Oil Leak Peanut Gallery' I've also been working on converting my Reactor Bipe EP to FPV.

The foamies and stuff distracted me for a while for FPV but I finally decided to convert my electrifly reactor biplane. It has a lot of wing, it is fairly light. And last, but not least the last non-FPV flight ended in a tremendous crash which split the fuse in half, ripped off the top wing, tore out wing ribs, etc. I was flying in calm + gust conditions, and right on landing a 15-20mph gust hit me from the side and put it in.

I should have trashed the plane, but instead I collected every single last piece of balsa from the field I could find. I spent a week a while back rebuilding it, cutting out new parts, re-assembling, sanding and stiffening up the plane and re-installing the electronics. After all that effort, the only thing that gives away it's past is my loud mouth and my terrible re-covering job of the damaged sections.

I installed the FPV electronics into the plane and all is going well. I originally had powered the video TX off of the main battery which worked, but put a lot of noise into the video/down link. I've since switched to a 500mAh 3s just for the video and down link and that's working great.

I finally got my back ordered Eagle Eyes antenna tracker, but had some setup problems with it (my fault), so I disabled the servos for the time being. Once the weather is good again I will spend some time re-calibrating it.

The great thing about this plane is that while it can fly fairly fast, it floats into a landing. I've recorded a couple of FPV while flying line-of-sight so that I can review the videos and get an idea of a 'good landing' and other flight characteristics as compared with my normal flying style
Here are the photo's of the setup. I'm still working on the video and will post that this evening.

Here are the specifications for the setup, I thought I should include them and forgot to do that when I originally posted this

Plane: Electrifly ePerformance Series Reactor Biplane EP (long name!)
Stock Specification:
Wingspan: 35" (890mm)
Wing Area: 600 sq in (38.7sq dm)
Weight: 34.2 - 38.2oz (970 - 1085g)
Wing Loading: 8.2 - 9.1 oz/sq ft (25 - 28 g/sq dm)
Motor: Electrifly Rimfire .15 35-36-1200kV
ESC: Electrifly 45 Amp
Flight Pack: Turnigy 2200mAh / 11.1v / 3s

FPV Setup:
Camera: WDR-600
OSD: Eagle Tree OSDPro + eLogger v3 + GPS v4 + Barometic Altimeter
Tx: 900Mhz / 500mw

Total all up weight with FPV: Not known yet

Base Station
Receiver: 2 x 900Mhz receiver. 1 modified with a new SAW filter on an 11dbi patch panel, 1 with the original SAW on dipole antenna.
Antenna Tracking: Eagle Tree Eagle Eyes w/ReadyMadeRC Tracker base.
Power: 1500-2200mAh 3s LiPoly battery. One Deans plug powers everything else.


Here are the photo's of the setup. I'm still working on the video and will post that this evening.

Here's the video of my Reactor FPV conversion



The video kinda fades at video extents. I was having some calibration(me) issues with the Eagle Eyes antenna tracker so I unplugged the servos and just went for broke.

This video is NOT FPV! It's the FPV setup, but I was just testing everything LOS to make sure it worked.
Speed is via GPS, altitude is via barometric sensor which may have bee thrown off in a pressurized situation.

Looking good JC, the plane is awesome man love it

Other than the GPS, your setup appears to be working pretty well! Do have your OSDPro set so the GPS requires a 3D fix? If not, you should, I have never seen my speed drop to zero like yours does in turns, and I've been very impressed with the radar feature. Also I never see the home indicator show blank once I start moving. None of your GPS based instruments seem to be working very well during some portions of the flight, do you have the v3 or v4 GPS? have you spaced the GPS rx as far from everything else as you can? This video is with only the v4 10hz GPS for speed and altitude, and although I've experienced some drift, I've never seen anything like your video.

Hey Aaron, this is the v4 GPS. I started the flight before the GPS had completely locked in to all the satellites. As you can see it starts off with three and drops down to around 1 satellite at the beginning. Once I do the nose over landing and get it going again it picks up more satellites with a working home marker, etc. Normally it locks in satellites more quickly, but it has not been super in that location, I may try to extend the leads and move it to the horizontal stab.

The Spd is from the barometric airspeed sensor which I have not installed on this plane yet, SpG and the speed ladder are from the GPS. Alt and the Altitude ladder are via barometric altimeter.

(06-06-2010 07:22 PM)aaronredbaron Wrote: [ -> ]Other than the GPS, your setup appears to be working pretty well! Do have your OSDPro set so the GPS requires a 3D fix? If not, you should, I have never seen my speed drop to zero like yours does in turns, and I've been very impressed with the radar feature. Also I never see the home indicator show blank once I start moving. None of your GPS based instruments seem to be working very well during some portions of the flight, do you have the v3 or v4 GPS? have you spaced the GPS rx as far from everything else as you can? This video is with only the v4 10hz GPS for speed and altitude, and although I've experienced some drift, I've never seen anything like your video.

ahhh, I see, you may want to move your GPS as far from the camera and video tx as possible (for some reason your pics didn't load when I first looked at this post) I see you have a filter on your video tx, and a torroid on your GPS cable, but you still want to get that gps away from the camera and video tx... that will probably make a big difference.

I recorded another flight on Tuesday, still fiddling with the antenna tracking, it was still acting weird, so I recorded the flight, came home and re-calibrated again. Hopefully this weekend will be nice and I'll be able to take all of the equipment out to the big farm field and spend some quality time working on things. And if I get them working well, try an actual FPV flight.

I've added the second battery monitor onto the OSDPro/eLogger v3 via the Temp2 port this evening and that seems to work well.

I wanted to add RSSI, but for the moment Spektrum RSSI uses the GPS port on the eLogger, so it's only one or the other. It would be nice to get the RSSI info but Eagle Tree is still working on an expansion/multiplexer board to resolve that issue.

Next steps are to add the microphone to a wind free location and install the barometric airspeed pitot and sensor. The inner pitot tube has moved off center from the outer pitot tube so I need to fix that first.

Here's the third test video, it is only recorded in FPV but still flown line of sight.

Updated w/video on this thread: http://fpv-community.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=617

Nice !

After some great FPV flights with the bipe I managed to knock the motor mount off about a month ago on a rougher than expected landing (looked kind of ok in the video).



I rebuilt the motor mount and went out last weekend to fly the bipe again. I had one of the club members wear the goggles while I did the test flight. Something was way off as it seemed like the plane wanted to harrier a lot, as if the plane was tail heavy, but it wasn't.

Anyway, I finally trimmed out the plane and it turned out I had used a partially discharged battery(!) and ran the battery flat. Due to some other issues (speed controller not set to do a safety shutoff, not being able to see the battery voltage or hear the low voltage alarm) I ran out of power about 20 feet up. The plane did not survive and split in two.. again.

Excellent smash into mother earth. I looked back at my club buddy who was wearing the goggles and he had both fists clenched like he was holding onto a Y yoke of an aircraft going 'whooooooaaaaaa!' I think seeing the crash first person might have broke him LOL.



Fortunately at the last club meeting people were giving away old planes like crazy. I managed to pick up a trainer type electric plane which I'm going to use to train a friend, and as I was trying to leave the parking lot some guy ran up to me and said 'here! take this' and threw a Great Planes Spirit 100 glider (100-inch wingspan) at me. It needs electronics and is oolllld but I'm going to mount a brushless motor to it and it should be pretty nice for my next FPV project!