I'm Lacking Protos Power

[eltreato]

Hi guys, I am running Zeal 430s, they are noticeably fartier than the SABs it came with. I am hoping to get time for another flight or two the weekend.the weekend.if it behave like it did on my last flight without any brown out then I will be happy. Strip its cageif it behave like it did on my last flight without any brown out then I will be happy. As for a pitch gauge, it's definitely something on my list. With my smaller helis so far I have been able to make do with the phone app or an analog gauge. Those days are coming to an end.

[DoubleCH]

Battery can also make a difference because while Protos stock 880kV motor is rated enough wattage it's not a high-power wound motor (i.e. not low IR). What that means is that Protos motor won't draw increasingly higher current enough when load increases so it'll require a good governor setup to pump much more throttle under load to maintain HS. A high IR battery with low IR motor under load will just squeeze more juice out of the weak battery and heat it up but at least you won't see as much bog as with a high IR battery with high IR motor which will have too much overall IR motor speed will drop very noticeably. That's why I ask what blades and what batteries.

[DoubleCH]

Originally Posted by eltreato

if it behave like it did on my last flight without any brown out then I will be happy.

What do you mean by brown out? BEC voltage drops and bad behavior on servos/gyro? Or do you just mean bogging like hitting LVC?

[DoubleCH]

Originally Posted by eltreato

Hi guys, I am running Zeal 430s, they are noticeably fartier than the SABs it came with.

From what I've read about these blades they shouldn't be the problem.

[eltreato]

I had three instances in my first couple of flights where my heli started to power down. The gyro didn't reboot and I still seemed to have servo control but my headspeed dropped very very dramatically, but I was able to regain control. It happened once during hard piros and twice during moderate to hard pitch pumps. At first I thought it was a cold solder on a motor lead, but it seems to correlate with a higher load through the my 90A esc. Once I dropped the blade pitch to about 11.5 +/- it went away and I've since been able to fly it reasonably hard for probably half a dozen flights. Now that I've readjusted the pitch closer to 12.5 I haven't been able to reproduce it, but I'm still keeping it up in the air a couple mistakes high in the even I need to auto.

[DoubleCH]

Sounds like barking up the wrong tree. Doesn't sound like lack of power problem at all but something to do with BEC voltage brownout. What did the vbar log show when that happened? Don't unplug once you land but check the lowest BEC voltage logged by vbar. If you can't recreate the problem, do the same check after a flight and get a rough idea how the BEC is performing. Maybe you have a bad servo randomly dragging too much power from the BEC with no direct correlation to what pitch setting you have. When I ran Align 510M cyclic servos (one of them was on its last leg) and stock YGE60A ESC BEC, vbar logged as much as 0.7V voltage drop and caused me a few system failure crashes. Now that I dumped the 510Ms and run TGY-S306G-HV and external BEC, vbar logs show no more than 0.1V BEV voltage drop even in the most extreme flights.

[eltreato]

Hi DoubleCH, I should clarify, the lack of power issue that incited me to start this thread has more to do with the general sluggishness in performance I was encountering with my Protos, not the brouwnouts that I was encountering. They are, however, related in a sense that by having lowered my min/max pitch settings the brownouts went away, though these lower settings contribute to poor general performance in the first place. I like your suggestion about checking the logs, and will see if I can get this info during my next flight. Your theory about a bad servo is plausible, this Protos was built up using low-end components so it's possible it could be something like a servo causing this grief.