Observer UAV

Maiden flight after fitting an INAV flight controller. Initial flight to trim aircraft and check power demands and video signal. Now that it is trimmed the Flight Controller can now be fine tuned. Once this is done the aircraft can be made to fly level (Horizon) or maintain altitude (AltHold). Or circle round a point (Loiter) and fly back to where it took off RTL (Return to Launch) where it will again circle around this point. The FC now has full control of throttle and flight surfaces in Loiter and RTL modes. On this flight only standard trimming was carried out.
Video HD

When things appear to be working fine I am always wary of updates. I have been using INAV version 2.3 from 2018 but apparently things have moved on in the past few years. A new version, 3.0.2 has had lots of tweaks and one of them is now instead of having to fly around in auto trim then auto tune so Flight Controller recognises how you fly, they have modified auto tune which will automatically create rates (known as PIDs) and save them. Just fly around in Acro mode and roll it, loop it, treat it roughly and the rates will be adjusted and saved. Also Gallieo satellites have been added for more accurate GPS. So all the Flight Controllers in both planes at the moment have been flashed to the latest firmware. Oh what fun. :lol:

Phil, does this mean that you'll know exactly where the model is when it all goes pear shaped? Spooky.

if the ground station is recording (it usually would be ) and the on screen display is set to show "plus code" (a derivative of Lat & Long) then you can enter the plus code into Google and Google maps will tell you where it is within two/three metres.