Ben74
Senior Heliman
Location: Long Beach, CA
| hi all. here's a little test i did that might add something to this thread. i used a device called a wattmeter (sold by astroflight for hobby purposes) to measure the current draw on my predator max. the wattmeter shows voltage, current, watts, and Ah consumed. the wattmeter was connected between the 2400mah NiCd battery and the receiver. the heli has three 9252 servos on the cyclic and a 601/9251 on the tail. the Rx is an 8 channel PCM futaba. at rest with the heli on, the system was consuming only 1 watt. holding the tail and rapidly wagging it back and forth caused the current consumption to rise to about 0.1A. this shows that the gyro itself is not consuming much current at all. next, i put my hand on the swashplate and pushed down hard. current consumption went to about 2A. pumping the collective up and down while pushing down hard on the swashplate caused brief peaks of up to 2.5A. however, i doubt that the swashplate ever sees the kind of load i was putting on it during this test. i was pushing quite hard, and did not want to push harder for fear of breaking something on the heli. the purpose of this test was to find the peak current draw, not the average draw so it's not highly relevant to this thread, but i thought i'd add it anyway. if i wanted to, i could go for a whole flight with the wattmeter attached and get an accurate measurement of how much energy was consumed in hard flying. however, i don't think that's really necessary. |
