In the last quadcopter post we clarified the load torque of the propeller applied through the gearbox to the motor shaft. We won’t even have a gearbox but the terms in the equation needed clarification. We haven’t yet covered the main point of the propeller: LIFT! A propeller blade is just a spinning wing at each …
This post explains how we determine propeller thrust and drag factors for our quadcopter project. The last couple of posts have been working out the sum of torque on our quadcopter. A few weeks ago, we covered the gyroscopic effect of the total airframe in the “equations of motion” post. Next, we looked at the …
In a previous post we got the Ardupilot simulator stable running the linear-quadratic attitude controller, but we had a hack in-place for normalizing our body torque commands from Newton-meters to -1 to +1 for input to the Ardupilot motor sub-system. Purpose This post uses a test stand to measure maximum available thrust over a range …