Maidened the Trioblin 570 today !!!

[cjm180]

Well I had to make a snap decision this morning, abandon the days plans and concentrate on the goblin with the view of a maiden by the end of the day, or put it away, continue with what i was supposed to be doing and come back to it in 2 weeks. Decision made.

I raced away, got the last few bolts loctited, and and finished the tail setup on the BD axon. On a side note, i ignored the advise in the BD wizard for the tail. It says set the pitch to zero at servo mid travel. After speaking with Joachim from BD, he told me to set it up so mid servo is mid travel. I never tested it rate mode, but on that setup there is a little bit of pitch on.

Got a pack charged and headed off for some farm land near where I live.

Once there I powered everything up checked all the directions and took it into the hover. The plan just to have a pack hovering, land and then check all the fasteners.

One thing that was obvious from the first lift off is how good the tail is at stock settings. It is absolutely lock solid, no wag, no drift, and it stops on a dime. No kick back or anything, absolutely perfect.

The head is a different matter. Lets say I was in the hover, and I put a little bit of aileron in to make the heli lean over and move sideways. When I release the aileron, it keeps going. When I put a little bit of opporsite aileron in to counter it, the heli levels out and slows, when I release the aileron, it tilts back in the original direction and starts drifting again.

I had set the head gain on a dial, I tried turning but it didn’t seem to change anything. On the diagnose page the dial is registering a change, infact from -100 to +100!. But when you go to the head / tail page the gains do not change. I presume this is tx gain being adjusted, and the FBL gain staying put? I presume somehow these multiply together for the control loop? Any input on this would be appreciated.

I am runing -15% expo on aileron and elevator.

Attached are a few screen dumps of the BD setup, and a castle log. I was hovering, landing to make changes, hovering again.

That tail is awesome !!!!

[muscleflex]

no photos of the heli?

[Peteski]

I have zero experience with BD, so can't help you there, but I found that I needed a relatively low head gain on my G380 tri-blade and it doesn't feel as locked in as I was used to. But now I've got used to the softer "feel" I'm quite happy with how it flies. It's actually very stable and tracks nicely in big air moves. Piro moves seem relatively easy and flowing too.

[bergen50uk]

BD's rock ! I agree with you that the tail is very good. I have 3 BD3sx and all perform faultless.

Looks like the Axon has a different computer interface but maybe post screenshot of diagnose page ? I run Futaba like you and adjust the head gain by a rotary switch set to channel 7 or 8 for the initial test flights. You need to fly forward flight to see the affect of changing the gain ( set mine so just out of any head oscillations ). Once I've got the gain I want I then setup rescue mode. I can't recall any of mine behaving like yours in a hover, usually rock solid. I don't use any expo in my setups.

[cjm180]

I will post some pictures when I get a min.

I have realised my mistake. The led on the axon was green. Infact throughout the entire setup I never noticed it change colour.

Talking to joe at BD, it looks like I had self level mode active the whole time. Which is why it wouldn’t respond to my head adjusts via the dial on my TX.
100% my error. I wont be near my heli for a week now but I imagine when I check the diagnose page the horiz dial will not be on zero.
Once I get on top of this I will fly it again. If I can get the head to be half as good as the tail I will be happy. The tail performance just for the little bit I did looked solid as a rock!

Bergen, I am new to BD, but I have seen screen shots of the 3sx software. It is different but I am sure underneath its all the same stuff.

[cjm180]

[bergen50uk]

Glad you sorted it, be interesting to see how the Axon performs on a 3 blade head as all my BD's are on 2 blade heli's I will probably try one on a Nitro as there is now a governor.

[cjm180]

I saw on HF a few people running axon's or 3sx's with the kse goblins.

I don't have a lot of experience in tuning, but joe at BD has been ace and we have had a few conversations back and forth over email during the days.

There seems to be a lot of chatter over on HF about he governor. Seems a but confusing / complicated.

Maybe u can educate me, why is it preferable to have the governor in the FBL controller and not the ESC itself? I find the internal gov on the castle to be good, dead easy to set up etc!

So that's how I am flying at the mo. I am most likely gonna purchase one of those castle live adaptors so hopefully that will give me telemetry on my 14sg of everything the castle logs.

I just wish while tuning the head and tail with the dials, you could display the percentages on the tx. while u r doing it.

[muscleflex]

nice heli! that FC looks funky! Not seen it before. What's it like?

[Grumpy]

Congratulations on the maiden flight. All the maidens that end up with the heli in the same condition that it started the day are good ones in my book!

As for the governor in the FBL vs the ESC.. In theory the FBL is better because the FBL knows when you apply collective and cyclic pitch so can compensate with more power before the RPM even drops. The ESC governor on the other hand can only respond once the RPM actually starts to drop, so theoretically it cant maintain RPM quite as well. In practice though a good ESC governor works fine because it reacts so quickly that there is no significant drop in RPM.

PS.. the heli looks great, very nice build spec.

[cjm180]

nice heli! that FC looks funky! Not seen it before. What's it like?

Hey, the setup seems to be straight forward. the wizard works really well. i had a setting off for the head so couldnt really get a fix on it. but the stock tail settings appear to be really crisp so far. will know more when i push it a bit more!

[cjm180]

thanks grumpy. yeah ok, i think i will stick with the current setup as my flying is not at that level. I will wait for a decent walkthru to be available for the axon gov. ultimately i suspect this is the way to go. But TBH the castle gov has been performing for my level as you say!!

[cjm180]

well over the last few days i did in fact confirm that the first flight was in self level. So i have corrected that now. the self level is active with a value less than zero (zero to -100) and rescue is +100. So i have this on a momentary switch. so i just moved the endpoint on one side so it outputs zero. then when active it goes +100.

So i only have one set of packs for this heli. So confirmed the bank switching is now working. I brought it into the hover and did some fast piro's and rapid stops. Tail seems good at its current setting. So i started on the head. I did some sideways moves and did fast stops. I kept increasing the gain till i started just getting a tiny elevator bobble on the stops. So i dropped it back 10 points.

Did some circuits and it feels very locked in. On rails. Every move of the sticks can be seen clearly and immediately in the heli. I must have my other helis set up to be really soft.

The tail is a little snappy for me. I may try and dial in some expo for it. Failing that i can knock down the agility.

Anyways got a bit brave towards the end of the flight and thought i would try this rescue out. got it high and jsut hit it briefly to see what owuld happen. It shot up straight away. I heard the motor strain, but no tail kick. So all good.

So brought it in a bit lower to try again, this time i but an aileron move in, so it was inclined and moving. Hit rescue again and off it shot vertically. But this time came a very rapid and strong tail oscilation. I am guessing this is from the rapid input of throttle to make it climb. I put in a small tail input to settle it and brought it in.

So some work to do there i think. I didnt see this oscilation at any other time, so is this a function of the main or p gain, or i or d?

After 5 mins of circuits i brought it in. I checked the batteries after and they were sitting at 3.92 a cell. So i think i can maybe slow the head down a little more. The tail obviously looks like it has some spare capacity on the speed.

Any tips would be appreciated.

[JoeBailey]

3.92v per cell after 5 mins of flying is fine, I wouldn't worry to much about that.

My 700 kse's will go right down to about 1200 rpm without much trouble. the urakay will woosh about at 900 but it doesn't 3d too well at that.

[Grumpy]

Tail oscillation when you punch collective is a sign of tail gain too high, back it down a few %

3.92V represents about 60% remaining (40% used)... so that's fine. On that basis you could fly twice as long without issue, so if anything you could bump the headspeed up a bit!