![]() If you disagree with this nomenclature then you need to go away (and while we're at it don't get me started on the infernal mis-use of the word drone). In my native tongue, a quadcopter tilts forward to fly forward but a speeder stays level in the pitch axis. They worked flawlessly, flying right through bright patches of sunlight even over the dark blacktop of my driveway. I realized that in my sensor googling I completely missed the more robust VL53L1X sensor which works far better outdoors, so I ordered a couple and installed them. Unfortunately, the VL53L0X works horribly in sunlight. When they arrived, an old BetaFPV 85x quadcopter would be the perfect test platform due to its small size and durability.Īfter a lot of really goofy looking Arduino code, trying different filtering methods, many batteries and much violent bouncing between the ground and often smacking the ceiling, t he first concept finally calmed down and hovered at its setpoint altitude of 100mm. So I ordered some tiny VL53L0X time-of-flight sensors and an Arduino Nano clone. There are quite a few electronic sensors in the world that can measure distance, but the only sensors fast enough for this application are going to need to do stuff at the speed of light. In order to hover at a fixed height above the ground, the machine would need to know its height accurately at a very high measurement speed. Other channels could be easily mixed together later. After taking a look at the long learning curve involved in learning to cleanly modify existing popular software like INAV, Betaflight, ArduPilot, and several others to do exactly the things I wanted (especially later mixing several channels into rc-car style steering and adding safety features ), I figured the most straightforward way for a numbskull like me to get there would be to toss an Arduino microcontroller in between the RC receiver and the flight controller to intercept the throttle signal while passing the rest of the channels to the flight controller untouched. If I was successful in building such a craft, perhaps my non-FPV-nerd friends and my brother - whom races motorbikes and occasionally races RC cars - could easily pick up "driving" a racing quadcopter speeder thing without the risk of losing it in the trees or burying it into the ground.īeing an all-purpose geek whom my wife calls The NerdBomb, I already knew that the tech and code out there to accomplish this silliness already exists. This ability is quickly learned and far different from managing and mixing 4 functions on a FPV quadcopter controller. I reasoned to myself that most folks can easily drive a car in real-life or drive a race car in a video game. It would automatically hover at a fixed low altitude at perhaps half a meter, while being very reactive to the ground underneath it like a futuristic off-road racing speeder. ![]() If I got the basic engineering hurdles down, I imagined I'd design a quadcopter with an off-road car-like appearance and the ability to be "driven" with a two channel RC car radio. Sometime in late 2020 I decided it was time to see if I could build something that could merge the thrill of flying a FPV quadcopter and the ease of driving a FPV RC car. Quadcopters are perfect for FPV because they're fast, have no camera vibrations, and can easily see where the hell they're going, but there is a steep learning curve and a special motivation to get proficient enough on the controls to actually race them. Some folks into driving FPV cars mount their stuff to monster trucks or rock crawlers with a lot of height so they can see where they're going, but they're usually not driving at racing speeds. Besides, even if the shake issues are eventually overcome by tough micro gimbals there is still the issue of being too low to the ground to see the track clearly. While the gimbal sort of worked, it proved to be too fragile and fiddly to be practical. Over the years I intermittently tried various methods of camera damping and even constructed my own brushless gimbal. Some folks have tried o n-road FPV racing but being so low to the ground causes visibility problems (you literally can't see which way the track goes). Unfortunately, camera shake on an RC car is so horrible it is impossible to see anything at speed on all but the smoothest surface. ![]() Being an FPV enthusiast since before it was a thing, I always thought it'd be fun to race off-road RC cars via FPV to get that driver's seat feel without the expense and physical risk of racing real cars.
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