Well I’ve had enough of fighting the Arris Lander X3 electric retracts on my large 960mm hexacopter drone.  The gear retracts fine but it does weird things going back to the down position.  It takes about 30 seconds and about 20 attempts before the gear is completely down.  It will start by going down 2-3 inches, then it goes back up an inch, down three, up two, down three, up two.  The gear finally goes down, but not without a LOT of waiting and wondering if it will burn out something, or simply fail.  I do NOT want to have to hand catch this bird.  That’s a no-go.

The retracts come with mounts, larger legs, and the electronics needed to control them.  By removing all that I did free up about 150-170 grams of weight, which adds a few seconds to the flight time.

Pictured above is the big bird with the old/new gear back on, next to my 250mm racer.

I’m hoping to take this big bird traveling to the bahamas later this week.  I stripped the old stuff off today and did some test flights, which were successful.

Got a drone lover in your life who has a birthday coming up?  Perhaps a drone themed birthday cake would be a fun idea.  My wife stole my little tiny drone and put it on my latest birthday cake a few days ago.  She also was googling some drone cakes and found some of these images below.

At my birthday I powered up the mini drone and actually flew it right off the cake!  See the crowd’s reaction as it flies up (2nd photo below)…

A couple of nights ago my doorbell rang.  It was after dark and I wasn’t expecting anyone.  Before I could get five feet closer to the door the doorbell rang again.  Someone was in a rush.  When I opened the door it was two neighborhood kids, one about 8 years old and the other perhaps 6.  He had one of those tiny mini-quads which, as you can see below, had some battery connectivity issues.

“Can you fix it mister?”

“Can you fix it mister?” the kid asked… I told him I could probably fix it, but it would take me a couple of days because I was busy. So he left his quad and went home.

After dinner I decided to to my best Scotty from Star Trek and fix the thing in a fraction of 1/1000th of the estimated time. “I can’t fix the warp engines for 2 days, but I can get you warp speed in 2 minutes.”

I looked closely at the circuit board and could see markings for + and – battery connections. I re-stripped the leads, soldered them on, and the bird powered up perfectly. The kid was blown away when I rang his doorbell some 30 minutes after he rang mine. He was thrilled to have his bird up and running again. His parents asked me if I would mind “teaching” him some stuff about drones.

Sounds fun.