I built a MultiWii quad for my research project at university 2 years ago. It was fun searching through old forums trying to get as much information as possible. I also built my own frame out of aluminum...which was a mistake, cuz if I landed hard, an arm would bend and never bend back into the original position...so PID tuning became a hell of a thing to do each time. Still got a grade A in it lol.
I still have all my ancient early multiwii boards tucked away on one of my spare tool boxes properly prrserved in an anti static bag like they ancient relics 😅 It's wild thinking about the early days of Multiwii compared to now 😯 I feel spoiled as fuck now, roughly ~10 years later, rocking shit like 128khz 32 bit 4in1 esc's, ~470mhz H7 FC's, toothpick aio builds, micros, elrs, fucking digital video & the list goes on & on 🔥🙃 we went hard on this drone shit frfrfr
fax. i was lucky to get into it on a 3s KISS 1.03 FC alien rr5. i thought that was the bees knees. still have that old. alien and i think i'm gonna put a fettec osd on it and fly it again. i know i wasnt really "ruffin it" but im proud of myself for getting into the hobby with relatively limited resources. fpv has come a long way over the last 5 years. let alone 10!
Love learning about the history of quadcopters and especially FPV just as much as love the energy and excited this quartet of characters always provides. Shaun's creations rule!! So fun watching y'all fly!
This was freaking awesome!!! I was waiting for you guys to tell Bubby that our quads used to be made out of wood! He wouldn't have believed any of you. Shawn, this was seriously cool, nice job. Are you going to make the code available anywhere? This is a project I would like to try. And thanks to everyone for the great time at Kwad Camp this past weekend. It was amazing!
One of the main reasons why yaw sucked was because we were using airplane motors and escs which they didn’t have any kind of break. Good memories tho thanks for the video
I got in 2018 so this is something I can't relate with but looks really cool to see how much the community made it work to set the motion and make possible what we have today.
Bubbys reaction to zero throttle had me laughing hard 😆 Pfft he started on Radix on BF 3.5.7 (butter fw btw, still use it) most of us have been around way before that - born in the darkness 😉
Armadillos are blind af, but they can hear well. I've never seen an armadillo not run like hell as soon as it heard anything close. I see them almost daily in Texas. Good episode!
I still have a self-made MultiWii flight controller, I just ran across it the other day and chuckled to myself. It's in the same box with a KK board (which actually flew pretty well in comparison....)
Back in the day I started flying with a push button remote. Beat that you kids ! LOL. That was cool, when I finally got into quads, we where using clean flight, I was lucky enough to start late in the Hobby of drones. Thanks for the video.
Man, this is what I have always wanted to do. Definitely brings things back to the days of Kaptain Kook and the multiwii stuff. Love the stress test. Great to see how far we have come.
Cool stuff! I built the flight controller for a drone for my uni project last year using a PIC18F4321. I managed to get it to fly and level itself running the code at 50Hz haha. It was a little easier because I used a GY-25 chip which outputs angle rather than having to address the gyro and accelerometer directly, but even still it was a difficult feat to get that bird in the air! For comparison, my Microcontroller had a 32MHz clock, 512 Bytes of Flash memory and 256 Bytes of RAM whereas a modern F7 FC runs at 216MHz, with 512KB of Flash memory and 256KB of RAM!
Hey man! I'm a software developer and i want to learn how to build drones from scratch can u please guide me or provide me with links of resources from where i can learn
Interesting episode guys. I enjoyed the look into the past, it was pretty sketchy. Certainly glad I got into FPV after all that; grateful for all those advances.
I'd like to see a gyro attached to a momentary switch so when you push your bumper or what ever switch you place it on it'll turn off stability mode. Basically a momentary acro mode with stability after releasing the momentary switch or vice versa. + the Armidillo just walking up to you guys like that is awesome, think he wants to be part of the crew. 😅
respect for the work done, the hours of late nights in which you search for information and program and adjust the parameters to make some pieces of metal and plastic and some magnets fly where you want.
Shawn, can we try this with an ESP32 and a faster gyro? I'm down to help port the code over! I'd love to see you guys fly something like that. I'd give it a go, but I don't fly (yet...but I've been learning a ton from y'all!)
From time to time i asked myself why it was so cool those days to just roll or flip, well now i remember, because it was just a thing those days ya 😂👍🏻 I remember when a friend came up with a copter that has airmode on it, it was soo mindblowing that the props kept spinning 😂 ohh man those days
You guys are dealing so well with the awful latency that I suggest a long range experiment with a mobile phone on cellular network as an FPV cam (and maybe ELRS for control).
Try flying a drone located in Italy when you are physically in Detroit. I did that with Skypersonic and it was soooo much fun. Tons of latency. Almost had to fly in angle mode to keep from crashing. I did manage to fly manual mode, but, it was very difficult.
Yep, I started with a multiwi and then went CC3d in 2014. It is amazing how far flight controllers have come. We use to have a separate osd as well the first ones however there was no way to know your voltage except by feel and time. I remember flying new packs one after another timing them and inching up the timer till I got the flight time close. We all used to use the tape to mount everything and Velcro straps for batteries that always ejected in a crash.
I've been fiddling with kicad designing a f7 FC for fun. It's definitely a pretty interesting idea. I just think it would be cool as hell to have a quad I built with my own electronics I also built.
That looked fun. I've been at FPV drones since 2018. They were pretty well sussed out by the time I got to 'em. I was into r/c in the late 70s, building 1/12th-scale Tamiya kits, and using a 2-channel radio, before taking a three-and-a-half decade break. I never dreamed of the kit we have today back then. Even 2018 gear is literally Buck Rogers stuff compared to what was on offer in the late 1970s. And much, much cheaper, relatively speaking.
Oh, yes. My first drone aside plane was tricopter on MultiWii. It had aluminium arms like 300mm with 9inch props. It flew like a cow but was capable to take off with cam and capture some video. Thank you for reminding me this old days.
my first drone used the Paris v4 multiwii board. I bought it pre-soldered because I didn't have a soldering iron at the time. My second board was an Eagle something and it had dip switches to select number of motors and layout plus a normal and acro mode. then the kk board and about six kk2 boards I still have the Paris and a couple kk2 boards.
I started with the kk board. Which was nice because you didn't need a configurator. Then thr kk2 came out and we had a screen on the board to do our pids
Kiss still uses mostly the Multiwii configurator, my first build was Microscisky which was a brushed Multiwii and on the first flight it burnt a fet and I almost cried.
afaik, which might be outdated as heck: multiwii depends on other sensors to improve calibration and filtering on the gyro, even if you aren't actually using them directly for stabilisation.
omg! guys I was just at Bill Frederick Park flying with friends for my bday. hoping to see you guys and vanover. Did meet some UCF students with their hexacopter trying to make it deliver food.
I wasn't early enough for Multiwii, the first quad I had ran CleanFlight. It was the last version before Air Mode came in, so 1.7 I think? Anyway, yeah, quads back in the day were a handful. I remember that it was a good idea to plug in with the quad level on the ground, otherwise the gyro wouldn't have a good level. So that might have explained the inconsistency the guys had between flights in the video. Probably needed to give the guys Gemfam 5030 bi-blade props on a 3S pack for the rfull experience though! Or maybe slightly older school and build an Elextrohub. I think at a certain point the Electrohub was everyone's first quad!
I have a few Tricopters on Multiwii, they fly nice. If you just cruise around and fly smooth they are fine both Los and fpv. I recently converted a tri to Betaflight and am still tuning the yaw. It's ok but Multiwii is closer to being very good on the stock PID's.
I remember two breaking points: - APM 2.5 all in one navigation board - SimonK ESC firmware The SimonK firmware was great. Everything flows much better with this ESC firmware. It was a big step forward... Long long ago 😂
Man, I love this lol. I just started flying drones exactly a week ago, but I've hacked together microcontrollers and shit for years. I followed this trend a long ass time ago, and I really wish I would have gotten more into the drones. Really cool to see this again, and I think I'm going yo put some stuff together today lol.
you could get faster PID loop to stabilize even better, if you use 32 Bit microcontroller like STM32 blue pill board, instead of arduino, which only based on 8-bit Atmega 328p , and use MPU 6050 to combine Gyro and Accelerometer measurement, instead of using only Gyroscope which can drift overtime.
just shows how much fc and the firmware is doing. my quad with cheap motors, source one frame and f7 fc flies so damn good, it does what you tell it, and even in high winds when you let go the sticks it holds its angle absolute solid. ive thought about building a quad with no fc and jjust usig mixing just to see how impossible it would be to fly.
Had a sick idea for a episode I would love to see. Make a few identical builds and try to bind them all to the same model and try to get them to fly in formation 😂 would be fun to see if it could work
Quad might be too small. When i flew my multiwii it was on a 450 deadcat frame (later upgraded to a KK2). It wasn't very agile so i guess the gyro could keep up. The Yaw was pretty bad, especially as i was coming from a 450 helicopter, and yeah, i still have a couple of Y frames (a full size and a miniquad).
I tried starting with multiwii but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work, so someone eventually recommended the naze32 to me, which is what I ultimately started with
back in my days we didnt have texts, we didnt have calling, we sent pigeons to deliver letters and notes on scolls. "kids now a days"- what the fuck are you trying to tell me?
