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 posts have been working-out the sum-of-torques on our quad-copter. We covered gyroscopic effect of the total air-frame in the, “equations of motion” post a few weeks ago. Next we looked at the torque induced by the gyroscopic …
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 …