Remember that I always say in build and setup videos to remove the props (or not to mount them) when doing setup on the computer while having the battery plugged in?
I though I would do a demonstration video as to why you should do just that.
Charpu had his quad going bananas while doing throttle calibration. His story is very entertaining and a great reminder that it can happen to anyone of us. Watch the RotorRiot episode here:
Have you’ve had any similar experience? I would love to hear about it in the comments!
Stay safe
I had this happen to me on a large hex copter. I plug the battery in and the props started. My reaction was to push it away with my hands. I had twelve stitches between my two hands. I wish I could upload a picture so you can see the scares. I now wear gloves when plugging in and unplugging batteries. I still don’t know why it did that. I stripped it for bits shortly after as I didn’t like it any mor.
This is the most interesting time but it’s happened twice before and once after (I don’t learn lessons apparently). After a crash as I was inspecting a motor and bumped the throttle to WOT and a 10 inch APC prop sliced the side of my hand wide open. Had to drive myself home and hid it from my parents for ~7hrs as I was scared of stitches (had them twice before). When they found out I said it wasn’t major as it alredy had 2 band-aids on it to stop the profuse bleeding but got 6 stitches the next morning.
Pics in Links
https://goo.gl/photos/ggHhwi9zQFWUYe4e7
https://goo.gl/photos/owtGntagHHajukj38
Thanks for this impressive video David. Unfortunately it came a bit too late for me.
Made some stunts with my fun-trikopter last friday and came quite close to myselfe when i lost control. The copter hit me at my hip. One carbon prop sliced my left hand mid finger at the tip, another prop choped off the left stick of the radio. It ended up with a visit at the hospital, 4 stiches in my fingertip (autsch!). Good news: The radio and the Tri. could be fixed as well.
I built up my mini tricopter, and everything appeared to test and be working fine. I was ready for the first flight. I armed it before I could even increase the throttle it wobbled, flipped and shot across the ground. My first thought was an esc not calibrated. So I took off the props calibrated the escs again and all looked good.
Repeat the arming and the exact same thing happened.
At this point I thought maybe a motor wasn’t spinning full strength, as I had this issue with another copter. I held it down armed it to try applying some thrust. It wiggled out of my grasp, and jumped in the air making about 10 nice slices along the side of my hand. Fortunately they weren’t too deep and it healed without stitches. Althoug I will likely always have a couple nice scars to remind me to take off the props.
By the way, the flipping issue was caused by an incorrect naze orientation. So always check that 2-3 times before installing the props.
I had just moved into my brand new house, and I still hadn’t set up my shop yet. So I was working on a Mikrokopter quad in my gameroom, a nice room with a very tall ceiling and exposed beams. I was using a long range dragonlink and on that unit, you set up failsafe with the tx and rx, not with the quad itself. The MK had a nav board with gps, so it could fly waypoints and return to home. So I setup failsafe so that the would MK to fly to 100m, and then return to home for loss of tx signal (failsafe). All was working well and I used it several times in the field. Anyway I had just balanced the props to get rid of some vibration I was getting in my video, and I wanted to see how well it came out but the weather was bad. So I decided to put the quad in a hover in my gameroom. Well I get it to about 4 feet off the floor, but I didn’t have the dragonlink mounted on my tx, I had it resting on the back of the couch. And just at that moment the dragonlink tx slid off the back of the couch to the floor and in doing so, it ripped the trainer jack out of my tx, immediately setting the MK into failsafe. So it attempted to fly to 100m altitude while inside my gameroom. I said it was a high ceiling, but unfortunately not quit 100m tall lol. Expensive lesson as the quad was a rekit and the ceiling and floor had expensive repairs. But I can laugh about it now because no one was injured. That was the last time I hovered any outdoor quad indoors.
This video should also be watched by all those people hand catching multi rotors. About half of the guys at our flying field do this and I cringe every time I see it. I am just waiting for someone to get a blade in their eye! We already had one guy that needed almost 20 stitches after he took a 15 inch carbon fiber prop to the firearm.
One guy told me it was fine to hand catch because he had sonar and optical flow so ground hover was super accurate. I asked what would happen if his hand went under the sensor during a hand catch. His answer, “well… It might freak out and think it was too close to the ground” thats what I want…. A full power quadcopter flying into my face!