Well, after 3 months in the making and many, many hours of hair pulling. My Mikrokopter Hexa XL is complete and is nearing flight ready. With such an investment both in time and money, I’m understandably nervous about flying it for the first time.
The Hexa was bought to support an ongoing project of mine, essentially, it will be used as an aerial photography platform to monitor sites around the coast of North Wales, building on work that I did during my PhD. The Hexa will in fact support one of my PhD students who starts her project in September 2011. We will first develop a database of existing aerial photography of the Welsh coastline going back as far as we can (hopefully to the 1940’s). We will then revisit these sites at the present day with the Hexa, taking up to date imagery. We’re going to look at changing human utilisation of the coast and the dynamics of seaweed and biogenic reefs.
The Hexa was acquired from mikrocontroller.com and is the basic set. Notable additions are:
- MK GPS
- MK3 mag
- Bluetooth connectivity to PC
- LiPo holder
- 6 LiPos 6600 mah
- Ultramat 14 Plus charger
- MK HiSight II SE camera mount.
The video below shows the first test of the system. I had to wire a LED to the buzzer to visualise the beeping error codes and status updates so it took a while to get that far. It is a worthwhile addition and the LED is simply soldered to the positive and negative terminals of the buzzer.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLXp6EmQK_Q
The first test flight should be next week…