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Welcome!

Glad you dig it, cheers!

Basically a little after lockdown was lifted and Phuket was still super quiet. Now Phuket is super busy, so no way it'll be like that again (unless we got another pandemic, or some economic recession, or both, haha)

For some reason got Bee Gees' Stayin' Alive playing in my head now 😆

Cheers, thanks for the kind words and an awesome new year to you too!

We'll see what absurdity I might get up to, but yeah I'm doing a NYE party event thing, mid-Jan a tourism conference in Bangkok kinda' thing, end of Jan a corporate conference kinda thing in Vietnam. Wish that could all be FPV flying instead, but nah lol. February free-ish, maybe I'll get some odd projects done, we'll see 😅.

Vietnam rocks dude I have been there twice this year and nothing but praise about the place...And if we had the choice we would all be flying FPV bro.@@STRIKINGFPV

I guess the algorithm appreciates your engagement though 😅

Haha, I try. StressingFPV has a ring to it though 😆. To fly FPV legally here you need to rego yourself with the NBTC (for radio frequency usage), then take that document and throw it at an insurance company to get the drone insured, then take that document and throw it at the CAAT to register the drone in general. The CAAT part takes the longest, 1 to 3 weeks on average for them to say okay assuming the paperwork is good. Helps to be in-country on a real visa rather than a visa-exempt situation - I'm not sure if visa-exempt will fly. The good news is all this can be done online, with payment done via local bank transfer or PromptPay. If you're currently out of country, then technically it's impossible to sort out until you're in with the entry stamp in your passport. In that case, you might end up doing what most do anyway and just fly illegally because the likelihood of getting done by the police is relatively low, especially if you don't fly irresponsibly. Many (regular or FPV) drone pilots here, including local commercial ones, probably still unregistered, or at least started-off not bothering with rego until much later in the game.

Cheers Bones, I try to keep it smooth. Also try desperately to not crash 😅

Serious guestimation, basically. Without access to proper simulation software, without fully understanding all the dynamics of regular prop design, let alone toroidal design, I just take the basic principles of prop design, geometry etc, and tried my best to make it work, within the limitations of the design software as well, such that it's somewhat easy to make the design modifiable.

Well, I've since determined that the greater issue is not so much the scraping, I reckon it's the warping creating inbalance. My latest video tests two variations of the loop-bone without any prop guards, and prop-splosions still occur 😆

I guess if I were to try and apply this design to a turbine blade, I believe it's still fine to use an aerofoil shape, however the orientation would be different. In this prop design, the leading edge is facing the direction that the prop turns. For a turbine, the leading edge would need to face the oncoming wind. Basically an inversion of the prop design, if that makes sense? If you've watched my tutorial on how I designed mine, you might see a bit easier how to go about designing it, but you'll have to think about how the rails which guide the loft command need to be laid out. Apologies for the late reply, btw, you know, day job and life drama, etc.

Basically you need a radio controller with a trainer port and then get yourself a headtracker unit, either a premade or DIY one. Plug the headtracker into the radiocontrol and configure one of the outputs from the tracker to send its signal through your ELRS transmitter. Crucially, ELRS needs to be in wide mode or one of the full-res modes, so that the AUX channels can have higher resolution so that the movement of the servo is smoother. In hybrid mode, for example, channel 8 only has 6 positions, which won't make for great servo movements.

Can you give me anymore details to it? I have got head tracking on spektrum(ix20SE/DX18 and crossfire)@@STRIKINGFPV

I mean, technically batteries should be measured in Watt-hours instead of Amp-hours, if you want like actual available power, but battery voltage plays a crucial role in what spec of motor you need to get, so batteries are spec'd with the voltage (or cell count), then how many mAh it has in the tank, and then the current (C) rating to see how aggressively one can draw from it. I currently think the status quo on how we differentiate between battery configurations is pretty good, though I really don't like C rating. It's like a function of its own capacity, whereas I wish they'd just give peak current-draw numbers instead of making us have to calculate it, haha. As for determining how much power we've used, one could theoretically calculate mAh used using the voltage curve on a battery's datasheet, but then different batteries will have different curves. We could count the number of amps used assuming a correctly calibrated current sensor, but then battery capacity diminishes with use, so eventually you'll be running out of power even though your reported usage is within the battery's original spec. In the end, I think watching voltage and getting used to that is pretty good for most FPV pilots, especially ones expecting to do aggressive flying where voltage drop is something significant to consider (and the battery will bounce back up after a heavy current-draw, so there's that). A battery floating above 4 volts per cell won't have much voltage drop when doing a punch-out, but a battery at 3.8 or lower might seem to suffer more. Being able to watch that I think works out the best in this particular use case. Different for more standard cinematic drones by DJI and the like, but the batteries are all the same, they can't fly aggressively so the batteries aren't abused, the batteries have charge/discharge circuitry onboard which can probably aid in determining usage and age, so they can actually do all the fancy checks and calculations and stuff and get pretty accurate readings. We could do the same if you read the charge info on your battery charge to see how many mAh it dumped into the battery, which can tell you if the battery is losing capacity (assuming you stop flying and the voltage stabilises around the same point after you stop drawing current). But yeah, not really worth it. Not sure if that's answered anything for you? It's late here and I'm a bit sleepy after a long day of work, so maybe I went off topic, haha.

@@STRIKINGFPV thanks for the detailed explanation, really helped me understand all the questions I had

@@devopsrealitycheck No worries. After re-reading it the next day I'm glad I managed to be somewhat coherent in the explanation, but it's a complex topic to cover. This is I think yet another reason why it's easiest to just monitor voltage and get used to that at first. You can further build-upon your own understanding of how batteries work later on, picking up bits of knowledge here and there.

Perhaps, but considering the counter-weighted props I've recently tried and also the behaviour of the "traditional" prop that I also 3D printed in the toroidal hover testing, I have a distinct feeling that the flexibility of the final part is playing a significant role in whether or not the prop is viable. I think the tri-loop design being self-supporting is one of the biggest reasons why it's working pretty well. I think it's also why the bi-loop counterweighted prop flew (though not for long) and the single-loop counterweight prop just exploded on spin-up. FDM printing is showing its limitations here, as is resin considering not many people have had success in getting strong enough resin prints of this to not explode as well.

Quite possibly, for tri-loops I think that would likely be the number #1 benefit. Bi-loops still have enough prop area that a quick movement might yet give you a gash, the tri-loops being much more rounded more likely to brush one off, maybe give a friction burn at most (drone would likely crash before that, haha).