I’m in the process of building a tricopter for long distance exploration and decided to go with the Naze32 flight controller paired with GPS and the RCTimer MAVLink OSD (which is just a hardware variant of minimOSD). I’ve got everything up and running now and it’s an awesome combo, but to do so I had to dig through a mountain of forum posts and videos to understand how to set everything up. I’m writing this post to compile some of my ah ha! moments to hopefully help you out with your setup!

Before I start, there are a couple of videos by Mochaboy RC that were incredibly useful in this process and they are How to setup a Naze32 Acro / Funfly Flight Controller and How to Setup KV OSD MinimOSD Naze32, without these I would not have been able to get anything working!

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It was about a year and a half ago that I became interested in multirotor helicopters, around that time I set out to design and build my own basic tricopter. This series of posts will explore my journey of building, crashing, modifying, learning and iterating. The process has been exciting, I’ve learned a lot, and it’s become one of my longest running projects to date! Read on if you’re interested in multirotor, building things, or if you want to know what the heck the photo above is all about! Continue reading →

Recently I’ve become interested in the R/C FPV scene and all things multirotor. My ongoing project for the last few months has been a DIY tricopter multirotor that I fly FPV with. The tricopter I’ve built has been through more iterations than any other project I’ve done and has been great fun! I’m always trying to improve it’s flight characteristics and range and most recently that has meant swapping out my Hitec 2.4Ghz controls for a UHF Long Range System.

Before doing this my controls was the limiting factor on range, the 1000mW video link I use can go much further, so that started the hunt for a low cost UHF LRS I could use with my existing Hitec Aurora 9 transmitter. The lowest cost LRS I could find was the Orange RX OpenLRS combo that’s sold on HobbyKing.com. For US$50 you can get a transmitter and receiver based on the OpenLRS hardware, but unfortunitly the transmitter module is not made for Hitec and is way too big to fit.

That’s where the AutoCAD model above, and a 3d printer comes in! I created a model of my existing 2.4Ghz transmitter module so that I could remotely connect it to the OrangeRX OpenLRS transmitter from HobbyKing. This new printed module snaps in to the back of the Aurora 9.

Here’s the module with the lid Continue reading →