My name is Jeremy Moseley, and this is my blog.

I had a chance to disassemble and take a closer look today. Appears the mount hole on the motor (physically part of the motor) is completely stripped, and part of the base is bent, interfering with the housing, preventing it from rotating. Long story short, need a new motor. Boooo.

Took the copter out in perfect weather. The altitude hold on the AUTO mode is failing for some reason, so more tweaking is needed. I also lost a propeller mid-flight, and have some damage to one of the motors.

Took the copter out yesterday, in high wind, to see how things would go. Broke several props and had no results with beacon tracking. Changes to the PID parameters is needed.

So after slaving over it for several days I managed to reverse engineer the implementation of the MAVLink libraries that ship with ArduCopter. The Arducopter code is not very well documented (this will bite me in the ass in the future for sure), but with an effective search function for searching the contents of files in sub-folder (thanks Notepad++) I was able to figure out how things were implemented, and get things running.

Today I made more progress on the beacon circuit and program. I decided to go ahead and begin integration with the arduino processor. I have attached an LCD screen, allowing me to see the current fix of the beacon, and it will (eventually) parse information from the quadcopter such as battery life, distance away, etc. As of right now it will display current GPS data, as well as switch menus with a momentary push button. The other menus currently have placeholders in the software, but the menu transition code is written and working.