Fifth Flight

• After the crash in flight number 4, I replaced the whole backbone with a more durable spruce bar, which brought the weight up quite a bit. Despite this, it now flies way more stable.
• The new wifi setup is a lot better. It feels way more responsive, and I had a range of “the meadow”. When I stretched the limits (Map says it was about 200 m, it felt like more, idk), I could feel it drop some inputs, but I could safely steer it back. Video will start to stutter before that, because the drone stick is less powerful.
• I’m not sure if the rigid backbone or the wifi improvement made it so much better, but I guess both. For the first time, I did not struggle to keep it in the air, and could even experiment a bit.
• My experience so far: It climbs reasonably decent and it can fly level without too much elevator at around half throttle (I’m using the “trigger axis” of the controller for throttle, so it’s hard to see without looking, but the log seems to confirm this).
• I have barely touched the rudder, using the ailerons and a bit of elevator makes the plane turn just fine. It feels a bit “stiff”, probably because of the stabilization. I’ll retry in manual mode soon.
• The plane needs quite some speed to keep its new weight in the air, so it doesn’t glide that good. But it can still glide, if it has to, just keep the nose pointed down and the airspeed high.
• In the video recording, the barometer shows some random numbers, but in the telemetry, it looks fine. To be investigated.
• As is custom, the last flight broke the motor off the backbone. I intentionally used balsa wood here, so the wood would break before anything expensive does. All in all, I’m really happy with its performance. F yeah, it flies!