How to Fly a Quadcopter

When you’re just starting out and wanting to learn to fly a
quadcopter there are a few general rules you should follow. Remember
you are flying a powerful piece of machinery that can break it self and
can damage other things if a collision happens. Quadcopters do have
somewhat of a learning curve so being patient and really getting down
the flight controls is extremely important to flying well and keeping
your costs to a minimum.

Things to consider:

Safety of yourself
Safety of others
Keeping your quadcopter in one piece (it can be expensive!)
Not breaking anything (windows, cars, etc)
Flying away and losing your quad

With all of the above taken into consideration we recommend the following scenario when first starting out.

Take your quadcopter to a large, wide open field with no buildings or power lines around.
Keep distractions at a minimum(people, phone, etc) and strictly focus on the task at hand.
Some recommend tying your quad down with a 4-5 foot piece of string to limit it from flying away
Start 1-2 feet above the ground and practice hovering, flying from
spot to spot, and landing. Get a really good feel for the controls

Once you are confident in your skills take things to the next level
by flying farther and higher. Don’t push it, as you increase the
distance the technical aspect of things will become more and more
difficult. You will need to learn to adjust and use your judgement on
how fast you want to push the limit.

As always, have fun and enjoy the hell out of your new toy!

Quadcopter Instructional Video

We recommend you watch the following video that covers the majority
of the things we just spoke about along with some additional details and
trouble shooting ideas.

The AR Droneis
very simple to fly but does not fly like anything else on the market.
If you are going to move up to bigger or more advanced quadcopters you
are going to need a different set of flying skills. In this article we
are going to start learning how to fly them and help you get your copter
off the ground.

The first thing you need to know is that flying a quad is exactly like flying a R/C
helicopter. The controls are exactly the same so if you have helicopter
experience, you can easily fly a quad while flying a quad is excellent
practice for flying a helicopter.

The Controls

Unfortunately, if you have been using the AR Drone, you will find the
controls to be basically swapped when you move to a different product.
Normal controls will have the altitude/rotate on the left with the pitch control on the right. If you don’t know what that means, just follow along for a complete explaination.

Altitude

On
the left side of the controller the joystick control, when moved up and
down, will adjust the propeller speed causing the copter to gain or
lose altitude. Before attempting to take off, you need to make sure your
weight is properly balanced front to back and left to right to make
sure it will take off straight.

Note:Before your very first flight, its a good
idea to have a more experienced flier do a test flight and get it all
trimmed properly.

YawThe
yaw control rotates your craft left and right. The further you push it,
the faster it will rotate. Until you get really comfortable with
flying, it is best to keep the front of the craft pointing away from you
so you don’t get disoriented. As soon as your craft is facing you, the
controls are actually reversed and it is very easy to get confused with
the controls and end up crashing. Since multirotor copters are
inherently more stable than a helicopter, it is usually easier to
recover from getting disoriented but you still need to be pretty careful
about getting confused.

Pitch

The right joystick controls the pitch or angle of the copter to enabled
it to move forward/back and left/right. What this is a actually doing
is increasing the speed of the propellers in opposite relation to the
direction you push the joystick. If you push the joystick right, the
left side propellers will speed up to tilt the copter and cause it to
move to the right.

Hints

Start by standing behind your quadcopter and facing in the same direction as your drone. This way when you move the stick right, the quad will go right, etc.

When lifting your quad off the ground, immediately bring it up 2 feet
or more vertically. If you do not, the prop wash and ground effect will
make it harder to control.

Simulators
Not all simulators have models for
multirotor copters, but since flying a helicopter is identical, you can
use pretty much any R/C simulator to practice with. I personally use the
ClearView R/C Simulator as I have
always spent a lot of time on simulators before any helicopter flight.
The nice thing is that if you can get half-way decent at flying a
helicopter in a simulator, you are in really good shape for flying a
quadcopter.

Summary
Flying a multirotor copter is relatively
easy and some people with no previous flight experience have had good
success with just firing up a quad and learning on the fly.

How To Fly A Quadcopter

Welcome to How to Fly a Quadcopter

This guide will show you everything you need to know to fly a
quadcopter. These tutorials will also apply to flying any other
multirotor. After reading this page, be sure to check out the flying
lessons.

The Controls

Below is an example of all the controls for flying a quadcopter and how each control works.

Roll tilts the quadcopter left and right by speeding up the rotors on one side and slowing them down on the other.
Pitch tilts the quadcopter forward and backward the same way that roll does.
Yaw rotates the quadcopter by speeding up all of
the rotors spinning in on direction and slowing down all of the rotors
spinning in the opposite direction.
Throttle controls the up and down axis by varying the overall speed of the rotors.

These controls also have other names, for example: roll = aileron, pitch = elevator and yaw = rudder.

Stabilization

There are usually 3 main stabilization modes for a quadcopter.

Rate, also know as manual, hard or Acro.
Attitude (not to be confused with Altitude), also know as self-level or Auto-level.
GPS-hold, also known as Loiter.

In the video tutorials I’ll be teaching you to fly in manual mode, it’s the hardest to learn but the most fun.

Before You Fly

When learning to fly a quadcopter, these are the things you should do
if you want to have the best experience while still flying safe.

Go to a park or big grass field.
Fly in the morning to reduce the chances of flying in wind
Don’t fly with distractions
Stay away from people and animals
Take it slow, don’t go too far past your limits.

nedelja, 24. maj 2015