I’m useless at flying mini quads. Project “Get good at flying mini quads” is my way of trying to improve my skills whilst helping others to learn along the way.

Part 4a – Tuning the yaw and flight testing

My previous tuning exploits were cut short by a bush fire so this is a follow up to that article where I am finally able to sort out the yaw tuning and do a little test flying.

My biggest problem was that some of the reading/watching that I had done suggested that stock yaw P gains were far too high and needed to be dropped in order to get a succesful tune. I had therefore dropped yaw P to around 5.0 to match the Roll and Pitch settings and was experiencing a lot of overshoot and sluggish yaw control. So I went back to the books and thought “Why would EVERY PID controller set the yaw P gain so high if that was wrong?”. As a backup I also took a look at one of Skitzo’s videos as he is always kind enough to share his settings for the QAV250.

Anyway, I decided to up the yaw P and see what happened…

All done then!

So it looks like this part of the project is now at an end. As I said in the video, I may tweak the I and D gains a little to compensate for the move to bullnose props but I am happy with what I have achieved and have even exercised my new skills on some of my other builds with great success.

For those who are interested, these are the settings I ended up on:

• RC Rate is set to 1.00
• Looptime is calculated automatically by the Betaflight firmware

A quick note about the dreaded jello…

When I designed the R220 Evo, I moved away from the traditional blue silicone balls and used some soft silicone screw mounted bobbins instead. The reason for doing this was to give a much more secure camera mount that would double as a protective hood for the FPV camera.

During all of the test flights I have been experiencing terrible jello and concluded that the mounts were too hard or the props/motors were out of balance. I tested this by replacing the bobbins with the blue silicone and balancing everything – the jello was worse than ever! In desparation I reinstalled the bobbins and fixed my Xiaomi Yi to the plate. No jello!

Eventually I thought to look at my tired old (not that old) Mobius. Turns out the whole lense assembly was slightly loose in the case allowing it to wobble freely in flight. I took the lid off the case and put a bead of hot glue under the mounting slot – problem solved!

Now to go out and finally shoot some product video for the R220 Evo.

Next time…

Next on the list is “FPV Flying”. Obviously I’ve been doing a fair bit of this for a while so I imagine this will be a review of some tips and tricks for flying with a tilted camera, what angles work best and how to land when you’re looking at the sky!