Hey guys, some cool news here – friction-enabled cyclic is coming soon! The idea was borrowed from Bell 206 cyclic design – a semi-spherical cup moving on top of the spherical gimbal enclosure. Lithium grease is used to provide smooth drag. Nuts are used to adjust the friction.
Parts-wise, the difference between this base and the spring-loaded one is only in the enclosure and longer bolts of the lever connector (200mm bolts are used in the prototype). The spherical friction cap in its “proof of concept” version was designed to require less plastic to print and will be redesigned for an easier print and better looks, two nuts will be replaced with a single plastic nut (similar to what we see on some of the real helicopters). Another feature I want to try adding back is a detachable stick – that worked awesome with the first version of the MKIII gimbal.
While testing it, I found that the cyclic felt kinda slow. Looking for the reasons for this behavior, I found that ADC poll rate was set to 64 times per second which was too slow. Changed this to 128 and updated the file in the repo.
If you want to change this in your configuration without downloading the whole firmware:
in i_cyclic_base.ino tab
change cyclic.setSPS(ADS1115_DR_64SPS) to cyclic.setSPS(ADS1115_DR_128SPS)
Stay tuned, cheers!