Let There Be Light – Lighting the Hexacopter

What do you do when the hexacopter you’ve been building for months is flying fairly well and 90% of the way there for your needs?  Tear it apart!

After a few line of sight flights I’ve found it is easy to get disoriented.  Not only is it hard to tell what direction the bird is facing, sometimes a strange illusion happens making it look like the thing has rotated 90 degrees and is about to take a nosedive.

My little quadcopter had lights under the arms indicating front and rear, so I thought I’d replicate that same effect on the big bird.

Let There Be Light

I also wanted to be able to turn the lights on and off.  Even more complicated, turn them on and off while IN flight.  Can you say stealth mode?

Last night I wrapped up that setup.  I had to run wire through the arms of motors 1,2, 4, 5 for the lights.  While I was in there I ran higher quality servo cable to those arms as well, and eliminated many solder points which were potential failure points.