450 Good flying today.

[Dirk]

Today is a public holiday here by us. Guess what........the weather was perfect. Not a breath of wind. Quickly charged my batteries and went flying. Man, this Trex 450 is sweet! I flew through six battery packs at the end of the day. I did a lot of hovering and then flew some circuits. This 450 moves quite quickly. You have to be ahead of this machine if you don't want it to become a distant speck on the horizon.

Today was also the first time I flew with my telemetry. I set my battery pack alarm at 10.5V on my DX8 and managed to do 8 and a half minutes of hovering. When I landed, the voltage was down to 10.8v. Checked the batteries on the charger and the individual volts still read 3.7v per cell. Sounds okay to me.

Any recommendations on the voltages will be appreciated. Electric is still all new to me.

Hopefully, the weather will play ball this weekend. I want to remove the training gear this weekend and fly without it.

I will try and put a short video on here tomorrow.

 

[Dirk]

Some pictures of my heli, and one of the very satisfied wanna-be pilot.

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In the air

 

[Westy]

Looks like a nice build you have done there .... I like the nice tidy wiring job you have done. the Min I run my batts to is 3.2-3.3 per cell

What brand of 3s bats are you running Dirk?

 

[Stambo]

The rule of thumb with lipo batteries seems to be don't discharge them below 80% of their capacity.
If you have a charger capable of telling you how much mah it puts back in, you can tailor your voltage alarm/timer to tell you when to stop.
EG 2200 mah x 80% = 1760
So if you are using a 2200 battery and putting back less than 1760mah you can afford to go a bit further.
As your experience (and the amount of throttle) increases, your flight time will change accordingly.
I have my alarm set to 3.5v so when it goes off under load I have enough reserve to give me time to land.
Once the load is removed they tend to settle around 3.6 to 3.7.
I generally put back about 75% of capacity so I could probably go a little longer if I wanted.

I hope this helps.

 

[Dirk]

Thanks Westy,

Most of my wires run in between the frames and exits under the 3GX unit. I purposely left some slack on the wires to prevent vibration issues. My lipos are X-Power 2200 mAh, 45C packs.
To me the most amazing thing about this heli is that I have not had to do a SINGLE adjustment yet. Nothing.

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As you've rightly said Stambo, the flight times will go down as I gain more experience. I am not into 3D flying and do more scale type of flying.

 

[Lee]

Dirk, you may find that flight times will increase by 30 seconds to a minute, as you start to get into forward flight. Hovering takes more power than FF due to the transitional lift. When you get into more demanding flying, then it will come down again.