Dean,
Thanks for the post. It is good to deal with modeling issues rather than politics, global warming, and BOM
.
I flew yesterday with the lower throttle setting and also with a few changes in the CC ESC parameters. As a background comment my CC ESC was setup to run governor mode on the Brodak Super Clown with its stock motor with high kV (except that I had changed the governor mode from the SuperClown Low Governor mode to the High Governor mode for the E-Nobler). Anyway up to yesterdays flight the ESC parameters were:
Auto Lipo detection, Soft Cutoff, Heli Governor High, Forward Direction (yes I know this doesn't matter unless the plane moves backwards!), and more importantly:
Motor Start --Custom (75)
Throttle response--Medium
Motor Timing --Low (was hoping to conserve battery power--although CC says this is best choice for outrunners (??)
PWM rate -- 13kHz (default)
Current limit --insensitive (especially since I am pushing past 35A with this 35A ESC!)
Governor Gain--Medium (50)--this was necessary on the Super Clown because I was getting motor power oscillations on hard square maneuvers
Spool-up speed ==High (but even that seems like an eternity!)
Yesterday I changed the following parameters:
Motor Start --Medium (50)
Motor Timing--Standard
Governor Gain---Custom (70) (this is higher than before)
Spool up--Custom (9)--still takes a long time!
Also I flew yesterday with the Zigras at a "16" setting (32% full throttle)---this works out to ~9100rpm
One comment, is that the lap times were pretty nice a little slower than before, and the rpm was held steady (same 11-5.5 prop as before). Overall felt pretty good, but I will admit the wind was relatively calm, so if there was some wind I might have need for more power. I don't have the 11-7" APC prop, but I agree that I should try it. It would move me down more into the power region of my particular motor kV and battery sweet spot. As a matter of fact, that was what I was doing with the Super Clown, moved from the suggested high rpm 9-4 prop to eventually the lower rpm APC 10-7.5.
Here is data-logger plot but the volt and amp plots were pretty strange--they were way off as if the datalogger was using a different scale for the data. This could have been due to my screwing around the day before with a 4.8V nicad setup to let me use a RC setup to look at throttle settings. I didn't reset the data logger before the flight. Anyway I think it is working ok, but operationally it doesn't expect to see major cell count changes for one the multiple data sessions. Anyway l left the pack voltage and current draw off this time becasue of that. But in the plot, the top trace is airspeed, the next is rpm, and the lower (green) is the altimeter reading. Now I hope you realize I wasn't flying underground!---there seems to be a drift due perhaps some pressurization due to airspeed. Eventually I'll track it down. Now it is useful to tad the high points of the flight and correlate airspeed with the pattern.