I made all my preparations to maiden the MonoBot today. Did a short tethered indoors test to see it even hovers. It did, but wasn’t balanced right, so kinda hit the bed and had minor damages. Fixed it and went outside. The first test is the time that you will definitely know if your design is right or wrong. BECAUSE, I made a deal with the universe: When the design is not right, it lets me know by slamming my unit to the groundJ And that happened MANY times. So, the plan was:
1-Test the flight capabilities with the new electronics with IR NOT activated
2-Activate IR in the air and see how it responds
This is the part that hobbyists with IR sensor experience will laugh their butts off: The IR system didn’t respond the same way outside, the way it used to inside. Came in, checked the serial monitor, it works fine. Went outside again, the same problem repeated. Then I guessed that the sunlight is interfering and googled it: bingo. I felt really dumb, dealing with with IR sensors for months now, building them and not knowing this fact!
So, after finding about this, I still decided to test it without activating the IR sensors at all, to see if it flies. I was out at dusk and I realized that the sensors actually started working. But still didn’t activate them during the flight just in case. Below is the video of the first flight. I definitely felt the slow response time, resulting from the signal filtering code. However, considering that I am getting a PWM signal, passing it through Arduino, converting it to PPM and filtering it before feeding it to the flight controller, It was pretty good. However, I still couldn’t eliminate a rough landing due to not being used to these new control characteristics and damaged a servo and some body parts. Took me about 30 min to fix. The irony is that if I activated the IR sensors, considering that they started working at dusk, I would never have the rough landing as the unit would adjust the throttle.
Anyway, now will find a way to filter the sunlight so that the sensors work in daylight. Will probably do a second test tomorrow at dusk with the sensors on…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBPW...ature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBPWu2jBECU&feature=youtu.be