The illusion of control

Regardless of the actual implementation, all design requires control.  While initial project meetings floated (LOL) the idea of an Arduino-powered drone, it was decided that without the ability to secure a beacon at the finish line, we wouldn't be able to reliably point the duck in the right direction and make sure it stayed there.  So, as per usual, a helicopter had to die.  This time, it was my well-worn out 6-channel Twister CP Gold.

My Twister Gold had its final throes in our car park over a period of about a month of flying, crashing, flying, crashing, fixing, crashing, flying, crashing, fixing, repeat, as eventually a key part of the swash plate broke off, and one of the blades lost the ability to adjust its pitch.  Needless to say, this rendered it useless, and it was more work than it was worth to fix.

After a bit of work, some disassembly, and a single tear, the bird had been reduced to its useful components, the rest disposed of.  One thing that does improve things over last year, however, is the comms situation - the CP gold comes equipped with a six-channel transmitter and receiver.  Currently the transmitter is configured for a helicopter but will work a lot better if I can reconfigure it to separate the channel mixers.  Helicopters are complex in that moving one stick needs to trigger several different reactions from servos motor, so we need to make it behave more like a plane - one axis == one servo motor. If we can do that, we'll have a drive channel, three independent servo channels, one possibly-useless 3D switch, and a cool feature - the final channel of this transmitter seems to be a landing gear switch.

That will prove useful.