Oh no! How about throwing a ball at it or making a long PVC pole? I got mine stuck about 40ft up before but a little throttle got it right down.

Nah, it's totally stuck at the top of a huge, very tall maple. I looked for it last night but got horribly lost in the forest and barely made it out (wading through a beaver pond). I finally found it today with a handheld GPS and binoculars but it is WAY the f. up there. The only way to get it out is to cut down the tree (it's my tree and we have thousands) but it seem like overkill! Battery is dead and last night I could not get it to arm via Mission Planner. The only hope is that a storm brings it down I think.

It was my fault... I was living on borrowed time after a couple of near misses. I thought I was flying backwards south east, which would have been fine, but in fact I was going due east. I was only a few metres too low (I had 29m on the OSD... I think 35m would have been fine). I was way out of LOS at this point, about 500m from my location.

It's literally so high that you can only see it with binoculars!

Well hopefully the weather gets it down eventually, but those are some terrible circumstances. I live in a heavily wooded area, so this is always a danger for me as well. After mishaps like this it can be tempting to start getting into low flying FPV racing with a 250. It does make for some interesting video content..

Well, in the end we took a chainsaw to the tree and got it down. Tree came down like a mofo but the drone detached as it fell and literally floated down. Only damage was to the landing gear!

https://www.facebook.com/john.brownlow/videos/vb.586128892/10153352489143893

Woohoo! Definitely worth the time and even the cost of a chainsaw if you didn't already have one. Are you still building the new rig?

I already had one, but my buddy Greg brought two more. I think the new rig will now be a hybrid.

A hybrid in what way? Racing AP rig?

Ya, it's almost done. I've been trying to make it really tidy, so a lot of building and tearing apart and rebuilding. I'll post some pix tomorrow. I haven't dared weigh it yet but it's a big guy. Everything working and been tested but haven't calibrated yet. I have both the longer and shorter arms... I'm wondering how much prop I'm going to get in picture with the longer ones.

Awesome! Yes, it looks like it'll be quite large. How much thrust will you be capable of?

I don't know exactly... I don't really trust eCalc for this kind of thing! I suspect it will be slightly underpowered, but hopefully not fatally so.

As long as your thrust to weight ratio doesn't exceed 2:1 you should be okay. I just saw the photos and it looks pretty nice! You're doing a good job of keeping the wires tidy.

The wiring job was complicated by not wanting the escs out by the motors and not wanting anything in the compartment with the moving arms. So the layer above that was all PDB and escs, which took a lot of trial and error, and increasing the size of the standoffs to give a bit more room. Then above the power layer is the control layer with the pixhawk and receiver, and above that is the i/o layer (gps, telemetry etc).

It would be a lot tidier with a radio that did PPM and didn't need a converter, and also if I converted the servo wires to pure signal wires, which I will do. I plan to add minimOSD so I've tried to leave some room for that.

The Sunnysky motors should put out about 1120g each on 12x4.3 so that's around 4400g total. I'm hoping for an AUW under 2000g but haven't check it yet. It feels heavyish! On RCGroups folks have said that the SS x3108 motors are good up to about 2.5 Kg on quad. I'm not interested in sporty performance but it needs enough oomph to fight wind, which we have a lot of as I live right at the top of a hill, and rely on RTL quite heavily.

Stability was the main reason for going for a bigger frame.

I'm not in love with the motor mounts. They have a ton of space for ESCs which isn't necessary. A direct mount to the arms would be better. I'm still open to using the original arms to bring down the vibrations and get the props out of the camera FOV.

Yeah, I don't have PPM either, but my RX => FC wiring looks pretty decent. It's the ESC wiring that can get ugly. Looks like you got those ESCs in there pretty well. I didn't even notice you put them in there until you pointed them out. Kinda nice not having them on the arms, but hopefully they'll get enough airflow in there.

I think you'll be able to get some really nice video with that, especially with a Hero4. Do you have a youtube channel? I'm looking forward to seeing what you make with this.

I use Vimeo mostly but it's mostly private, production kind of stuff.

https://www.facebook.com/john.brownlow/videos/10153127086388893/

Not much on there public right now re Quads, just some gimbal tests from a Quanum Nova.

Most of my stuff is music related and/or shared privately. I run a music video web series which is the main motivation for building quads. You can see something we shot with an Inspire here

https://www.facebook.com/john.brownlow/videos/10153127086388893/

I have a ton of shoots for this coming up and wanted to be able to shoot some good aerial footage, mostly for the intros. I also do some still photography using 360 panos and am looking for a really stable aerial platform for that. They will probably end up being different birds.

My experience with RC planes is that only the bigger or very overpowered ones make any sense around here because of the wind. I thought the longer arms would increase the angular inertia of the frame and smooth out corrections a bit. We'll see.

Great! I'd love to someday do commercial shoots, but I'm still waiting for the FAA to get things together. I don't want to invest in a sport pilot license just to open the door to this work.

I FINALLY maidened this after destroying one of the motors with the ludicrously long SunnySky motor bolts and then waiting for ever for a replacements. A couple of tipovers because I got the yaw of the FC wrong, then it took off and OMIGOD it was like a miracle of stability. My 16 y.0. son who was helping me stood there with his mouth open. Even just flying in Stabilize it was like it was on rails, SO precise and stable, a real tripod in the sky. When I landed it (the light was going so first flight was only a couple of minutes) it just dribbled down SO slowly you could hardly see it moving. My, that was something! No video but seems like it will be a hell of a platform.

Wow, you're making me jealous! So you're running a Pixhawk clone? I wonder if that's the key ingredient to the stability. I'm sure the width doesn't hurt either.

I'm sure it's a bit of a lot of things... the width, the speed of the Pixhawk, the carbon fibre props, the SunnySkys, the weight. I didn't try in any GPS stablized mode so we have yet to see how that works. We were lucky to have absolutely still air too, that makes a ton of difference. Looking at the tlogs, the vibrations were negligible, which also hugely affects stability. The props were super well balanced out of the box.

Did you run an eCalc on it? How many minutes of mixed flight are you expecting to get?

eCalc says 8.5 minutes but I'm never sure how accurate it is

It should give you a general idea, but yes it won't be 100% accurate. I'm working with eCalc to integrate their reports into Rotorbuilds. Pretty soon they'll have a share link that you can paste into Rotorbuilds to link to your stats.

Here's the first footage I shot this morning.

https://vimeo.com/139846227

Looks great!

OK, did some tests today. It is about 10' to 10'30" to 20% of battery remaining, which is enough to get it down in one piece. With the Multistar batteries under load that translates to a voltage of about 10 to 10.1V. The default battery warning kicks in WAY before that (at 10.5V) but it's totally wrong for these batteries. The best thing about this platform is that it is absolutely rock solid, no vibration, and really doesn't care about moderate wind. I'm very pleased with it indeed.

I'm going to try double-teaming the batteries in parallel and see where that gets me, but it may not be worth the trouble. I'm also curious to try it with bigger props.

Did you try a hover test to drain the batteries? I haven't been bold enough to see how long my batteries will really last, but I generally take it down at around 11.1 to 11.3 volts.

It was still hovering pretty happily at 10V under load at the 10'30" mark and the graph shows it hadn't hit the cliff edge yet. Bounced back to around 10.8 to 11V. But I did accidentally drain the battery a while back and it came down like a ton of bricks so I'm definitely a fan of staying in the safety zone. Mine normally comes down with about 11.3 to 11.4V resting.

On the charger it put almost exactly 4000mAH back into the 5200 battery and I landed when Tower said 'battery 20%', so it all looks like its working properly (after some calibration anyway).

Okay so I'm about right on then. I try to come down at around 11.1 to 11.3 resting as well. How many minutes are you getting?

Ooops, nice suggestion but too late! It's a couple of ounces heavier but the Storm32 would have been nice. I'm somewhat battling weight on this build because of the frame. I will keep my eye on it though, may be something for another build or a handheld gimbal.

Some folks in that RCGroups thread have built hand-held gimbals with it.