Well after repairing the main board and replacing all the motor bearings and on my first test it seemed to fly okay but seemed to have problems holding height and would jump in and down all of a sudden.
I knew I had a new navigation board and sonar that I bought a long time back and so fitted that and then it seem to work fine.
Well that was until after a few test flights , as I fitted the battery for another test there was a flash of fire as one of the fet’s in one of the motor’s esc board decided it was time to self terminate.
Lucky enough I had a spare esc board that was in my old original ar drone so I grabbed that and re-soldered motor to it and will repair this fried esc pcb at a later date.
So after a lot of time and also lucky enough to have some spares laying around was able to get this ar drone working again.
But if I had to have buy news parts then this would never had been worth it.
So bear this in mind if you see a cheap faulty ar drone for sale, as chances are it will cost more to fix than buying a working second hand one or even a new one.
Right, as now this was working I fitted back the AR.Drone v1.0 and v2.0 WiFi-less mod by Miru
For now I just fitted MiruLLC (Logic Level Converter) as I had a spare one from what I ordered from him before and wired it up temp to the Arduino that I used before.
Reason I done this was way back when the last time I flew this mod with the ar drone it flipped over in the wind and fell and broke the central cross and also the mod which at that time I had fitted inside the drone rammed into the main board and killed the data line and I was unable to use the mod on that board as one of the data lines had a internal short.
Not a fault of the mod, but just bad luck the way it crashed.
But I do intend to make a smaller Arduino and rx combo and fit it back inside, but waiting to make sure this ar drone works ok for a while first.
So done a few test flights on back yard and seems to be working fine (touch wood)
Had to be careful as flying over grass can really confuse the sonar and bottom camera position hold, and with wind aswell, makes this very touchy and it wants to flip over really.
So I found using the Miru mod and switch the bottom camera off by the rc switch helped but of course it drifts off as the Parrot GPS recorder I have fitted does not come into play til I believe its over 10 metres in height. (Wish there was a way to enable this at lower with bottom camera position hold off)
Wanting to do some more testing before I take it up high enough for gps to kick in , but its just too windy at present and trust me this ar drone needs pretty much no wind conditions, more so when testing in back garden or yard etc as the turbulence you get from being inside a fenced area will throw it around a lot.
Outside at a field as wind mostly blowing from one direction it handles it much better.
Anyway, its been fun to use this again and although by todays standards the camera is poor quality and in wind its not as stable as say dji or walkera quads, its still kinda fun….
Happy flying 🙂