Graham's Blog

Faulty Wingsland R6 from Banggood

Posted on 7th October 2018 by graz27

Well after waiting months for stock to come in , Banggood finally had them in stock.

So ordered one and this is how it came

Was looking forward to seeing how the Wingsland S6 flew with a remote at last!

After charging up the remote and S6, went on to connect.

Hmmmm was not connecting!

Tried loads of times and checked with others and from youtube videos and I could not get the S6 to connect to this R6.

To cut a long story short, the remote Banggood sold me was a faulty unit!

As I knew its not worth the hassle to send it back to china, I ripped it open and checked inside and sure enough the wi-fi module inside is faulty.

Its not transmitting or receiving anything, so hence why my S6 will not connect.

The wifi inside the R6 must be working in the first place.

Very disappointed that I just my luck to get a faulty unit.

I have bought 3 Wingsland products from Banggood and out of that 2 of them have been faulty. Not very good odds huh!

Banggood was the cheapest place to get the R6’s , hence why I waited.

But I guess not much point in being cheaper if the products dont work.

Also note these might be cheaper made versions as the thumbsticks are all black plastic and on the others I seen reviewed they have metal silver thumbscrews.

I think they just moved over to cheaper manufacture, as others who have the plastic versions seem to work ok though.

So to anyone else thinking of buying one of these, prob better to get it from Aliexpress or Amazon or wait for them to show up at a reasonable price on ebay.

Will be posting another post of the teardown of the R6 for anyone interested in whats inside.

Posted in Radio Control Models, Wingsland S6 | Leave a comment

Wingsland S6 almost 10 mins flight time

Posted on 28th September 2018 by graz27

At last I found some upgraded cells that give almost the advertised 10 Minutes flight time!

Note this is actual flight time from take off to auto-land at 0% .

There is a big but with this though as you will see.

I got hold of a 4s LiHv Tattu-1550 and then split the cells to get 2 cells needed.

As these are 100C the cell thickness was really a tad too much for a nice fit inside the S6 battery compartment, but as this is only a test I undone the screws a bit to get it in and out. Width wise is fine, just the height a 1/2 mm too much really.

Does not look pretty , but only testing.

The string on the arm is just to tether it, in case it does some strange and flys off, while testing in back yard 😉

But the actual flight time from take off to landing was 9 mins 30 seconds!

But as I pointed out earlier a couple of times, this is just flight time and not time from when you hit the record button as that is always longer.

I took off at 7 seconds into recording and time was noted from then til auto land at 0%.

Take off screen shot

At 30% low battery warning after 8 mins

And finally landed at 9 mins 37 seconds , but – the 7 seconds before take off at start gives

a flight time of 9 mins 30 seconds.

So that is the longest flight time I have managed thus far with the Wingsland S6 and very close to the advertised 10 mins!

Normally with mine with a standard Wingsland S6 battery I get 5 mins 30 seconds actual flight time before auto-land.

But as you can see above, I had to use over size cells of 1550mah and 100C and so fitting them in the available space is a task indeed and also running wires underneath to connect to the lipo.

I flew without the sonar and position flow camera attached as in the photo.

This makes no difference as although this is the advanced model, none of these V2 S6’s have the sonar or position flow as those features were never added, so makes no difference with that hardware removed. (Unless in the extremely unlikely event Wingsland ever work on any updates.)

But from what I heard from many others is the Wingsland S6 was abandoned , so no hope of any updates now. (Last firmware update was Novemeber 2017)

So we are on our own to try and improve it.

Shame as I still feel this quad looks great and was totally let down by no software development, or hardware would not work together or maybe person working on software left the company or a licensing issue. Who knows…..

Anyway more testing to come…

I have a Wingsland R6 controller on its way from Banggood (Normally always out of stock) and also some different motors I will be trying out next to see what we can do to this quad.

Why bother some have said to me? Well I like a challenge and I am just interested to see how far one can push this abandoned little quad 😉

Posted in Radio Control Models, Wingsland S6 | Tagged Wingsland S6 10 mins actual flight time, Wingsland S6 10 mins flight time, Wingsland S6 Tattu lipo | Leave a comment

More Wingsland S6 upgrade tests coming

Posted on 9th September 2018 by graz27

Not quite given up hope yet on my S6.

Next tests will be with some yet again different cells.

Also testing with some more different props and also different motors.

I am sure this is pulling far too many amps for the size it is.

So will be updating soon to see if any of these mods makes much difference to the crazy short flight time.

Posted in Radio Control Models, Wingsland S6 | Leave a comment

DJI Spark repairs

Posted on 9th July 2018 by graz27

Well picked up a cheap broken Spark to see if it was worth fixing.

This one had a broken arm, badly broken gimbal and some other faults.

After stripping it down and checking it all over, I found the front sensor camera case had broken away and that was a simple fix with some glue as the camera sensor was still okay and just the plastic lens housing broken away from the board.

Glued the broken arm back into place and then reinforced it with some fiberglass resin.

No point in getting a new body until I know whether it worth it or not.

one of the wires had snapped away from the motor esc, so that was fixed and needed a new led cover.

after gluing back the arm and what was left of the gimbal, I tried a test flight.

This had to be done with a third party wired lipo as again not worth buying a battery yet.

Be careful you check where you are soldering, if you going do this battery mod.

Had to cut a small hole in top casing, but as I know I will end up getting a new case at some stage, this was not a big deal to me.

Had to use the DJI assistant version 1.2 to get access to debug mode and enable third party battery option.

With this set you can use a different battery. But…. no feedback on what voltage is etc.

As you can see from pic below the camera gimbal is totally out of focus.

And after taking the gimbal apart again, and examining the actual lens and sensor it was obvious the sensor took damage and is non repairable.

Problem there is a new gimbal assembly is almost half the price of a new Spark.

The motors in the gimbal worked fine, but was smashed so sadly not really usable that bit either as too much of casing was missing.

So had a look around and got a cheap second hand one that had a fault, but camera was fine and motors were not.

Lucky that you can get the motors and housing bit very cheap from china from Aliexpress,

I tested the camera on the second hand one and that worked fine, but with gimbal overload. New housing with motors should cure that.

Also using the ios app, I was getting downward vision sensor errors.

This seems to be the ribbon has slightly broken at plug where it plugs in on top of main board.

So yet again Aliexpress to the rescue with a replacement ribbon and bottom sensor assembly.

So hopefully once these parts turn up, it should work ok?.

But real question is….. Is it worth it??????

I guess if one can pick up a damaged Spark, and the main board and motors still work and not too much other damage. (Especially the gimbal camera part)

Some parts are cheap, but others like main board and the camera gimbal assy are expensive!

Steer clear from water damaged ones, especially ones that have landed in the sea.

Crash on land ones if not too badly smashed might be worth a go, but as you can see it can end up with a lot of parts need to be changed out and you need to get parts from china or it definitely wont be worth it!

So thank god for places like Aliexpress!