Xugong-10 Maiden!
At last! D-Day arrived, it had to be done, the Xugong maiden that is. I managed to stick a new inner tube on my front bike wheel, (another task stuck in the stalled job queue) Basically, I wanted to haul the quad and lipo's et-al up to the 'field' in a backpack, as per the I-RC hype. It's all part of the game, you don't put together a 'foldable' quad designed to fit in a backpack or 'shoebox' and then drive it to the field in your (cough) BMW.
Ah well, on wi' the tale! So I pedal an epic 250 yds out of town, to my 'designated test field', swung my legs over the barbed wire fence, and dropped the rucksack gently down upon the parched earth. Once I'd unpacked the kit, I hooked up the first 3300 mAh (4 cell) lipo (and flicked the failsafe switch to off), as it has a habit of getting knocked on in it's case. Preliminaries complete, I do the csc with the sticks, and props spin up nicely. Just above half throttle she starts to get light, as the semi auto takeoff works it's magic. Up she goes! Wow! Straight out of the 'shoe-box' so to speak, stable as a rock. Actually, I shouldn't have been that surprised, one thing about the Naza v2 is, if you've done your prep work unstintingly, that's what usually happens!
All in all, I'm loving the Xugong-10, and as I look back on the footage, it looks like even the crude one axis servo driven gimbal seems to work as well as can be expected. As for lipo times, I managed to set an audible 10 minute timer (after a faff), triggered from the throttle (somehow!), and the 4000 mAh lipo went way past, somewhere in the region of 15 mins, and she was still on 14.5v, probably would have managed 20 mins with the emax motors, and those superb T-Motor carbon props, man, they are awesome (and bloody expensive too I hasten to add :-( )
Oh yes, I should mention, after a particularly low outward flight along the hedge line, way past the 11,000v pylons, I got a failsafe trigger! I also lost video at the same time, and instinct made me hit the throttle to clime up and back into range, but that's not what happened, the video drifted in and out of the white noise, and before I really had a chance to panic, I saw that the quad was following the road, back towards home! I had no control at this point, then I noticed the osd display was on 'Go Home'! I let it do it's thing, and felt more than a little relief, as I usually prefer to test RTH under slightly more controlled conditions!
Anyhow, I waited until it had got back, hovering above, and took it out of failsafe, and brought it down manually (as the home point was very near to the trees) and, I do have some pride!!
Yo!
More footage soon...
