Help Needed: Troubleshooting Parallax Elev-8 Hexcopter
in Robotics
Hey guys,
My name is Drew and I am in need of some help with a Parallax Elev-8 Hexcopter. I am the CS Tech Lab Aid aide at a small university and have been tasked with getting the an older drone in the air. I have looked online for some help and cant find what I am looking for so I thought I would jump in here and see if anyone had a starting place for me. If you guys can help here that would be awesome or any pointers to other resources would be awesome too.
So far I have plugged in the battery and gotten chimes (from the rotors I think) I turned the controller on (Spektrum Dx6i) and gotten them to connect. I was not sure of the arming sequence but a video I saw had them move the left stick once to the left and then to the right. The indicator light then turned green but only one rotor spin when I throttled up and that one was super weak and only went back and forth.
I am very new to this and have never worked with this type of drone so any info would be much appreciated.
Thanks for your answers in advance!!
--Drew
My name is Drew and I am in need of some help with a Parallax Elev-8 Hexcopter. I am the CS Tech Lab Aid aide at a small university and have been tasked with getting the an older drone in the air. I have looked online for some help and cant find what I am looking for so I thought I would jump in here and see if anyone had a starting place for me. If you guys can help here that would be awesome or any pointers to other resources would be awesome too.
So far I have plugged in the battery and gotten chimes (from the rotors I think) I turned the controller on (Spektrum Dx6i) and gotten them to connect. I was not sure of the arming sequence but a video I saw had them move the left stick once to the left and then to the right. The indicator light then turned green but only one rotor spin when I throttled up and that one was super weak and only went back and forth.
I am very new to this and have never worked with this type of drone so any info would be much appreciated.
Thanks for your answers in advance!!
--Drew
Comments
Welcome to the forum!
Don't know how many of the ELEV pilots are still around but I will try and help. I have built Ver1, Ver2, and Ver3. Could you take a picture of the rig you have to see what we are dealing with.
thank you so much for responding so quickly. I wish I had seen this sooner. I just got back in the lab for the week and grabbed a few pictures.
I'll be in the lab a lot more this week so I will be much quicker in responding.
thanks for the help!
Here is the link to the build site.
https://www.parallax.com/sites/default/files/downloads/80000-ELEV-8-Quadcopter-Info-Assembly-Guide-v1.1_0.pdf
I will try and get the files for the Hoverfly controller board.
https://hoverflytech.com/contact/
I suppose it was right in front of me, it should have bitten me!
I don't know about that, but....
However.... That's an interesting concept, for how long did the company sell the ELEV family member UAV?
2012 Version 1 with Hoverfly controller.
2014 Version 2 with Hoverfly controller.
2016 Version 3 with Parallax controller.
Looks like the connector is ok so you could solder it back to the board but you will have to use kynar (wire wrap) wire to connect the signal pins to the appropriate microcontroller pins. Done that a few times myself to repair "gorilla fingers" problems.
You and I have done this but it's a bit of a trick for someone new to soldering (I'm not sure @fullonaviator is new to soldering).
If the repair is attempted, (and it think it should be) then I'd suggest using a small USB breakout like this one.
It looks like the ID pin isn't used and the other pins should be connected as shown in the photo below.
If shiping back and forth to Idaho USA isn't expensvie, you could send it to me and I'd fix it for you. I have extra USB breakout boards for just this sort of repair. It turns out ripped out USB connectors isn't very rare.