Quadrocopter - Part 8 - Failure

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The quadrocopter project was going fine till i decided to start soldering the circuit for the flight controller. I've burnt my hand countless times while soldering - frankly speaking im lousy at it - but this was worse.

I was powering the circuit from the BEC (Battery Elimination Circuit) on one of my ESCs. As it happens due to the genius of my soldering technique i accidentally shorted the GND and the VCC of the BEC together and as soon as i connected the battery there was a crack sound and the inevitable distruction of the ESC. Thankfully we did have a spare ESC at home that was being used in a hovercraft project that my flatmate was working on so that got sorted.


The Burnt-Up ESC.

After that things got worse. The maiden test flight - not conducted by me - of the quadrocopter (done just by connecting the ESC's to the RF receiver with no gyros and no control circuitry) did not go well - as expected - and the entire thing just flipped over after going about 8-10 feet in the air and came down in a less than controlled fashion (Damn gravity). The damage was minimalist - the lower acrylic sheet got a crack on it and 2 of the propellers had light scratches on them. After this i decided to replace the acrylic sheets with something less brittle  some time later decided to make the entire structure - this time with a few changes.

Then that someone accidentally sat on the flight controller board for the quadrocopter (also called Luke) and broke it into 2 pieces. Thankfully i had spares for all the components for the board so i will be re-soldering it and this time i will be careful.

I will write a post as soon as im done with the new structure and the new board but that could be some time.

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