Introduction: Quadcopter MultiWii Pro

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Hello everyone.

I would like to share my Quadcopter story, including the mistakes and problems. First of all, I would like to tell you who I am. I’m Martijn and I’m a third year student at The Hague University of Applied Sciences ( The building is located nearby the TU Delft) in the Netherlands. I started flying in the summer of 2013.

Step 1: Order List

This is my order list:

I bought a lot of parts, and some of them were bought incorrectly. Fortunately I could make a second one with the spare parts(Still working on it). Somewhere in the near future, I will edit this post to make for both of the quads a list of the parts.

Step 2: Safety

Be safe or you will have to go to the first aid. I’ve got a beautiful nose-cut due to unsafe handling. It happened when I was calibrating the ESC. I didn’t follow the safety advice, which was to remove the propellers when calibrating the ESC! 
My advice: Watch yourself, First aid is expensive in the weekends.

(ESC= The speed-controllers of the Multi-copter.)

Step 3: First Quadcopter

Here you can see my first quadcopter. T
he most important part was that it flew, but the motors were spinning to fast. 
I was happy that it could fly. But I had problems getting it in the air, so I bought some other servo motors.
The quadcopter was lightweight.

Click here to see my first flight with the quadcopter..

Step 4: Upgrades

My uncle and I made new arms for the quadcopter. I changed the motors to bigger ones, a bigger 12 inch 4,5 propeller, new positions for the high power leds, a new ESC for higher Ampere and a new transmitter.

Step 5: Led Power

You can see the blue package. It is a set of 2 rechargeable batteries. Both containing 1,5V, resulting in 3V. The lights are parallel connected to the batteries.

The two LiPo battery's I didn't use because this was to heavy for the first quad. The battery's both are 2 cells Li-Po battery's and my second setup quad i use a 3 cells Li-Po battery.

Step 6: Second Quadcopter

This is the start of something beautiful…

The arms

That angle profiles are far from ideal for this application. Because they are not symmetrical, the poor will not only bend the vertical force, but also twist. That would be annoying torsional vibrations may cause.

Usually, the strength (in normal flight conditions) is not critical for aluminum arms, tensions are relatively small. However, the stiffness may still pose a problem. Insufficiently rigid means risk of vibration. In crashes can obviously much greater stresses occur, but which are difficult to predict. But both strength and stiffness of perspective is a closed tubular section (round or square) is by far the most favorable. You might be a profile, but is considerably less stiff than a tube. Compare the moments of inertia of the different profiles / sections only once.

Step 7: New Quad

this is still in develop

Step 8: Communication and Camera System

Fly data:

For the communication between computer and quadcopter, I’m using the APM220(#define SERIAL2_COM_SPEED 57600). In the WINGUI, the refresh rate is set to 5hz.

Camera system:

On this link you can see my camera setup as it is at the moment. It’s still in test-mode though!

- TerraTec Grabby

- 5.8 GHz transmitter 200mW (Boscam)

- 5.8 GHz reciever (Boscam)

- SONY CCD 1/3inch Camera

- Circular polarized antenna's aka "clover leaf antennas"

Step 9: Programs

I use a few programs:

- Arduino

- MultiWiiGui (WINGUI)

- VLC

- ecalc (Use this to calculate your setup before buying something!!!!!)


I’m not going to explain this part, because there is a lot of information out there on the internet to.

Step 10: Crashes

I made a few beautiful crashes, though I learned from it and tried to repair it. Once repaired, I took it back into the air and now it’s flying again. Everyone is about to crash with a quadcopter. It’s just an amount of time….

So make sure your fail-safe works before you fly!

One time I had lost my quadcopter, but I was lucky enough to find it back. Here is the video.

Step 11: Questions

Yes it is able to fly and I like to fly aswell. So don’t hesitate to ask for help.

I will make this instructable more complete soon enough along with some more information.

If you got questions, I’ll try to answer them for you. You can mail your questions to : martijnvwezel@gmail.com, use in subject MultiWii, so it will go to the right map.

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Participated in the
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