My large Y6 multicopter after the maiden voyage, without the camera mount.
My large heavy lift Y6 multicopter, that I have built for aerial photography and videography, is now finished.
First time I flew it I used my KKmulticopter board which I have now reprogrammed from a quad X to a Y6 controller. It flew very well and stable compared to my quadrocopter and my small Y6.
I will write a little of the building process and the parts list.
Frame
The frame is the Y6 carbon frame from Coptersky that I previously have reviewed. I hadn’t tried it in the air at the time when I wrote the review but I must say that it performs really good.
I have put on some protective dampening on the landing gear and that was good. The landing gear is actually a bit fragile even if it looks well dimensioned. One of the thin carbon fiber tubes on the sides actually cracked after a not too hard landing.
Motors
The motors are RCtimer 3536 11 750 kv. My first choice of motors was the Avroto 2814 short shaft but they were out of stock for a very long time, so I bought the RC timer motors instead. They are short shaft too, which is great for coaxial constructions.
The motors are well balanced, but not perfect. There’s not much vibrations from the motors anyway, but I actually fine tuned two of them with small zip ties.
I really hope that those motors are good enough for my applications, even though they where in the lower price range. Many people say that in the end it will be more expensive to buy cheap motors to begin with and then upgrade to more expensive motors. Let’s see how that turns out, I will definitely blog about it if I upgrade my motors in the future.
Anyway, it would be even more expensive if I bought the mid range Avrotos only to find that I need to upgrade to AXI, or other even more expensive, precision motors in the premium range.
FC board
So far I have flown it with my KKmulticopter board and my Open Pilot board. They both have only 6 PWM outputs, so I haven’t yet tried the camera stabilaztion. My Arducopter Board is the one I will use later on since it has 8 PWM outoputs.
I will blog more about my flight control boards and compare them.
ESC
The ESCs are Turnigy Plush 30 A. I have good experience of the Plush 18 A for my quadrocopter. I didn’t spend too much time to calculate what ampere I needed. I just figured that 30 A x 14,8 V is 444 Watt per motor. For the full rigg of six motors thats 2 664 Watt. So I figured that was enough even if RCtimer actually recommended 40 A ESCs for those motors (maybe thats for 3S or something). The Turnigy Plush 30 has a burst rate of 40 A.
Neither the motor or ESCs has been particularly warm while I’ve been flying around. The setup is obviously lighter without the camera, but I believe it will be pretty ok anyway. If they would get too hot, I will simply place som heat sinks on them.
Propellers
The propellers are all APC 12×3.8 SF so far. I will probably change to 12×6 or something for the lower set of propellers. They need a bit higher pitch since they are in the down wash from the upper propellers.
Large propeller surface and low pitch is efficient and suitable for heavy lift and slow speed multicopters.
When it comes to multicopters for aerial photography, you should use slow flyers, because you will hover and fly slowly most of the time. There are not many high velocity maneuvers.
Since the propellers are so large and will lift so much, it’s not possible to use prop savers, which is really good for small multicopters.
Things I could have done differently
Since this project patrially is experimental, I shouldn’t built it so definitive. Eg everybody is talking about how good it is to solder the motors to the ESCs, instead of using bullet connectors, in order to avoid unnecessary broken connections. That is probably true when you want to secure your final construction, but for me it would have been better with bullet connectors.
It would be less time consuming, it’s easier to change motor rotation (eg KK and open pilot spins the motors in different direction on a Y6) and easier to change parts if it eg would turn out that the 30A ESC was too small or I want to change motors.
Now the ESCs are immediately under the propellers (due to short cables) which may cause vibrations. Next time I will probably use internal wiring and place the ESCs in the center. That will look better too!
Bottomline
I’m happy with this multicopter so far and it performs very well. It will probably take many hours of flying before I feel that my flying skills are limited by the multicopter.
Heavy lifter Y6 parts list
Flight Control: Open Pilot, Arducopter and KKmulticopter
Frame: Coptersky Y6 XL
Motors: RCtimer 3536 11 750 kv
ESC: Turnigy Plush 30 A
Propellers APC 12×3.8 SF
Camera: Canon 550D/T2i
Hello.
This multicopter it´s for sale.
how much it costs?
TKS.
alex villa
It’s not for sale. A rough estimation is that a similar multicopter would be 2000 USD depending on what parts you use.
Can you please post some specifications?
Flight time, Payload weight:
Flight time, No Payload:
Frame Weight With not electronics, motors or other accessories? (cant find this on Coptersky either):
Fully loaded up weight:
Which Flight control software did you prefer and were there any issues setting up the coaxial configuration?
And I look forward to seeing your FC board setup as well. Thanks in advance.
I am amazed you have chosen almost exactly what I bought starting my ordering of parts in August. see
http://forums.openpilot.org/topic/6323-sarv-for-british-columbia-mountain-rescue/page__fromsearch__1 for background
Got the motors from
http://montorc.com/A353611.aspx
I am going arducopter for the waypoint navigation and obstacle avoidance for paragliding film making project with my friend Peter Peru see http://www.explorex.net.
my Coptersky frame is 850mm same motors, 2 5AH 4s lipos Turnigy Dlux 55amp ESCs
Props 13 x 6.5 APC
The next stage in this development is to replace the 13″ props with 9″ ducted fans in a conventional hexicopter configuration with 2 fans between the arms of the 6 fram. The motors will remain in original position but the fans will be belt driven one with the pully on top and the other on the bottom to line up with the motors. I may adapt Sergey’s motor mounts into a side by side motor mount and rim drive the fans by making a section of the duct out of a “rim” added to the fan blades and rotating it as if it were a 3 spoke wheel driven by a friction wheel spinning at the wheel rim. I have the props from Trek Aerospace and I am working on having the motor/fan modules rapid prototyped which enables production by mail order. The online contract RP Shop wil make the parts ship them to youur RP account. My goal is an all weather fully enclosed heavy lift hexcopter that can operate in snow rain and wind..
The applications are left to yoru imagination.
Dave Norman
skype Envirowar
email multicopters@gmail.com
Good Build, The RC Timers motors are great but in some time prepare to change bearings, those are cheap bearings and actually thats what makes the difference between the $50+ motor and the RC Timer… you could use some ABEC 3 or ABEC 5 and it should be perform as the expensive motor.
Thanks for the advice. Do you know any good provider of ball bearings? And what dimensions are the ball bearings in the rc-timer?
Great write-up… quite inspiring. Thank you. How do you control your 550D camera?
Right now I only have 2 servos for 2 axis stabilization, I don’t have any control for the trigger. So I start the camera before take off.
What batteries did you use and what’s your average flight time? Also how much weight have you been able to handle with this setup?
I’d love to hear more about your arduino project.
I use Turnigy Nanotech 4S 6000 mAh. I can use two batteries connected together when needed. I haven’t time it exactly, but I’d say i can hover about 10 minutes when using both batteries.
do i need any counter rotation prop ?
Yes, half of them need to be counter rotating.