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| This article assumes that the radio, gyro, ESC and servos have been installed
as per manufacturer instructions. Due to the wide variety of components
that could be installed I won't try to cover their installation here. Although
individual articles on such items may be found in other sections of the
site, for example setup instructions for a Castle Creations Speed Controller. Items you will need : Tachometer, Pitch Gauge and good knowledge of how you ESC, Gyro and Transmitter work. Setting up the X400 is not as complicated as you might imagine and providing the instructions for the mechanical setup have been followed precisely the radio setup is actually quite straight forward. The ARK manual directs you to make sure that at the middle of the collective pitch movement all of the mixer arms and washout arms are horizontal. This is shown on page 19 of the manual and reproduced in miniature here : |
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| This picture doesn't go as far as also showing that the washout arms (above
the swashplate) and the mixer arms (above the washout arms) should also
ALL be horizontal with the collective pitch at middle of it's movement
and the swashplate horizontal. Once you have this mechanically setup such that with your transmitter throttle at mid stick you can get this horizontal alignment (and the servo should be horizontal as well as shown) you should be in a position to check your pitch range. If you have followed the link sizes in the instructions you should be getting an even amount of positive to negative throw on the collective. This may not be the -10 to +10 but it should at least be even. Where you place the collective pitch control lever on the servo will determine the limits of the throw you achieve. Pictured below is my collective pitch servo and where I have positioned the control horn. |
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| As can be seen the control arm is in the furthest hole from the center
of the servo in order to get +/- 10 degrees of collective pitch. If you
are a beginner you definitely won't want this amount of throw, I'll come
back to this later on. The X400 is much more stable than it's T-Rex cousin, so the cyclic setup is somewhat different. The T-Rex pretty much requires using the inner most holes on the cyclic servo horns and then some exponential or dual rates may be required to further calm down the cyclic response. The X400 is fairly docile if using the inner most hole on the servo but it is perfectly OK to use holes further out from the servo center to get the control response you want. No exponential is required due to the extra stability created by the weighted paddles. To give myself some time to get used to the way the X400 handles I currently use the inner most holes on my servos but will change this as I want more response from the controls. Some pictures to illustrate : |
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| OK, so on to the tail servo and the tail linkages and with tail wag firmly
in mind how do we get this bit set up right? Firstly the build thread covers how to get the tail pitch slider moving freely, this is the first job, if the tail pitch slider doesn't move freely then you need to get it sorted or all the rest of the information here will be for nothing. Once the tail pitch slider is free, connect up the tail pushrod to the conrol horn at the tail end of the boom. Now manually slide the control rod and make sure it is still nice and free. If not then you need to loosen up the tail control rod ball link using the squeeze with pliers method. Once this is free then you can finally connect the tail control rod to the tail servo. The control rod should be between 10mm and 20mm from the servo center to get the required throws for good tail authority and gyro control. The rest of the tail pushrod setup will be dependent on what gyro you are using and so I cannot cover it here other than to say to follow the instructions with your gyro. Picture of my tail servo below : |
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| OK, so we now have collective and cyclic throws setup correctly and the
tail and gyro (according to it's instructions) configured correctly. There
should be no servo binding at extreme stick movements and if there is it
should be removed by adjustment of servo end points on the transmitter. This just leaves one item for discussion, which is throttle and pitch curves. Experts will have no difficulty with this so I won't go into the detail of setting up 3D throttle and pitch curves. For beginners or those new to electric heli's the following is some guidance on correct throttle and pitch setup. Beginners should adjust the pitch range in the transmitter such that you have -2 degrees of pitch at low stick and +10 at high stick. This helps reduce boom strikes from chopping the throttle when things get a bit out of shape in the hover. Throttle should be set with a tachometer such that the X400 has around 2400 RPM in the hover and that throttle increases beyond the hover to try to miantain that headspeed as more load is introduced. A typical throttle pitch curve may look something like this .... |
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| OK, that's the basics of setup without getting into the detail for specific gyros or speed controls. I hope to get a full setup article done in future with far more information than produced here but for the moment I hope this helps at least get the X400 airborne. | ||||||||||||||||||||
