Drones in UK

Posted on 13th March 2023 by graz27

Not done hardly any flying with any of my quadcopters/drones for a long while.

Not only due to lack of time, but also new drone rules are making it harder and harder to fly and getting to the stage where one does feel is it worth it anymore?

Its also seems getting a sub 250 gram drone is not as good as it once was, as it seems now you have to be able to work out exact orientation under UK Visual line of sight, and this gets really hard with such a small craft.

With how reliable these are and how good the reception can be through the app on the phone it always seems crazy to me the UK Visual line of sight rules and now one cant fly away until a dot that you can still see cant be used anymore.

Not saying one should be able to fly tens of miles away, but a reasonable distant at least.

So you going to need very good eyesight to be be able to fly even a small distant away, which of course gets much harder with such a small drone as as dji mini etc.

Maybe time to go back to flying at registered fields with rc planes and helis again.

Hope I am wrong but think the boom days in drones and fpv etc is over….

Hope other countries dont follow the UK direction….

 

 

 

 

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Nissan Leaf EV Connect

Posted on 13th March 2023 by graz27

After I got my Nissan Leaf I could not connect it to the app as it was still registered to the previous owner.

So I called up Nissan UK and they managed to remove the old owner and then I was able to register for access to the app.

It was quite tricky to do and involved registering with different parts of the website that Nissan told me to do.

And had to be done word for word the way I was told or if one done it wrong the guy at Nissan said it would be very difficult for them to reset it.

I think this is due to most of the support for Gen1 Leafs being discontinued from the UK website.

So anyone else in UK who needs to have old owner removed better do it soon as maybe the

UK part of the site will fail to work in the not so distance future??.

Anyway Nissan UK was very helpful and I appreciate the support they still offer on a 9 year old car.

Well done 🙂

 

 

 

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2014 Nissan Leaf

Posted on 17th February 2023 by graz27

Finally got a electric car, being into tech I always wanted one and so picked up a Gen 1 2014 Nissan leaf that had lost 1 battery bar out of 12 thus far @ 50k mileage.

After getting it I plugged it into Leafspy Pro and it gave me a reading of 82.7% state of health of battery pack.

First thing I done was on this model I can set the max charge to 80% which I set as I only do short trips and setting to 80% will hopefully prolong the battery pack a bit.

So I intend on running it between 20% lowest and 80% highest unless I need a longer trip and slow charge at home.

Not used the car yet as no room to park it until I sell my old car, but will give it a full charge to 100% to balance the cells

What I have picked up though is a slower charger for it.

The original home charger is a 10amp one but the spare I got is a 6amp one which I got to

charge it slower and hopefully less heat and stress on battery.

Probably wont make much of a difference, but worth a shot to maybe put off the next loss of a battery bar a bit.

 

 

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Wingsland S6 Battery upgrades

Posted on 24th January 2023 by graz27

Another Wingsland S6 user contacted me and was mentioning about some replacement battery cells for the S6 which sounded interesting.

That was that Aliexpress had some cells on there from ROGRAPO Global Online Store which are upgrades from the 1400mah ones the S6 came with to ones which are 2150mah.

These worked out for me shipped including UK taxes and postage at £35.16 for 4 cells and hence to able to upgrade 2 batteries.

They took 1 month from ordering to me receiving them in the UK.

They weigh about 7/8 grams more than the original cells and similar in size and fit inside

the original S6 battery case.

If these are actually 2150mah then I assume they are a low C Rating and will be

interesting to see how long flight time they give compared to the original 1400mah cells

and also how quickly they drop from 100%. I assume they will drop very quick the first min of flight if they are a low C rating.

A bit too cold out where I am at present to test to get a realistic review of these new cells.

But one thing for sure, this is a much easier and better way of upgrading the old cells in a Wingsland S6, and because there is no smart battery circuit inside S6 battery there is no

reprograming of the battery to be done.

Of course the battery casing on these was never designed to be split apart and rebuilt and most of the time the clips on the case will snap apart.

So this is a solution to getting working batteries if you can use a soldering iron and have the skills to do this safely or know someone who can solder these in for you.

Will do a update once weather gets a bit warmer.

 

Normal disclaimer

And of course in this day and age of some looking to blame someone else if they mess this up, the normal DONT do this unless you know what you are doing or as with all lipo cells they can catch fire if punctured or shorted or mistreated!

 

 

 

 

 

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Faulty Powervision PowerEgg

Posted on 29th November 2022 by graz27

Got my hands on one of these unique quadcopters.

Condition was unknown and so a risk, and it came with no battery which is a royal pain as getting batteries for this is only possible from Aliexpress.

Anyway once battery arrived , plugged it in a all fired up okay but it will not connect to the app and can now see why it came with no battery.

Got onto Powervision and they did reply back with a reset method to re bind the craft to the wifi repeater , but after many many times of trying it still wont connect.

I took the repeater apart and managed to solder on 3 wires and red the console in via UART. :-

U-Boot 1.1.4 (Mar 11 2017 – 02:21:35)

U-Boot MI124
Wasp 1.3

DRAM: 64 MB
Top of RAM usable for U-Boot at: 84000000
Reserving 132k for U-Boot at: 83fdc000
Reserving 192k for malloc() at: 83fac000
Reserving 44 Bytes for Board Info at: 83fabfd4
Reserving 36 Bytes for Global Data at: 83fabfb0
Reserving 128k for boot params() at: 83f8bfb0
Stack Pointer at: 83f8bf98
Now running in RAM – U-Boot at: 83fdc000
Flash Manuf Id 0xc8, DeviceId0 0x40, DeviceId1 0x17
flash size 8MB, sector count = 128
Flash: 8 MB
Using default environment

In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Net: ag934x_enet_initialize…
No valid address in Flash. Using fixed address
wasp reset mask:c02200
WASP —-> F1 PHY *
F1Phy reg init
: cfg1 0x80000000 cfg2 0x7114
eth0: 00:03:7f:09:0b:ad
ATHR_AUTONEG_ADVERT:1DE1
ATHR_1000BASET_CONTROL:200
ATHR_PHY_CONTROL:3100
ATHRSF1_PHY: Port 0, Neg Success
ATHRSF1_PHY: unit 0 phy addr 0 eth0 up
eth0
Setting 0xb8116290 to 0x20402d0f
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
## Booting image at 9f680000 …
Image Name: Linux Kernel Image
Created: 2017-03-11 10:21:30 UTC
Image Type: MIPS Linux Kernel Image (lzma compressed)
Data Size: 846705 Bytes = 826.9 kB
Load Address: 80002000
Entry Point: 801b5ac0
Verifying Checksum at 0x9f680040 …OK
Uncompressing Kernel Image … OK
No initrd
## Transferring control to Linux (at address 801b5ac0) …
## Giving linux memsize in bytes, 67108864

 

I also managed to connect via UART to the main board on the PowerEgg  craft itself and there is a socket on the main mcu board on the PowerEgg thats labeled RX/TX/ GND.

And seems its based on the Pixhawk

HW arch: PX4FMU_V2
FW git-hash: 7a6fe86bbf478c743d43244220f39cc57aadb412
Build datetime: Aug 6 2018 11:19:23
Toolchain: 4.9.3 20150529 (release) [ARM/embedded-4_9-branch revision 227977]
MCU: STM32F42x, rev. 3
UID: 48002D:3535510F:33383932

I can see on the startup console that when I do a bind it says Link Success but does not show link on repeater or app.

But what I did notice was it has loads of errors on camera like:-

pv_camera: tx error -1

So I am wondering is there a issue with video from camera and fails to link to repeater and app because of that?

Because there is no video being sent????? Or is there a fault with the repeater or the Transmitter module on the Egg itself????

I am assuming as it uses Pixhawk and Mavlink that it wont say connected until it receives

Mavlink data.

Cant really go any further on this with out another one to compare it with.

So will just be a pretty ornament on shelf for now 😉

 

 

 

 

 

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