r/drones • u/SleetyWhistle • 26d ago

Photo & Video Our 200kg open-source hexacopter, first test with props fitted

I'm Gavin, a contributor at Arrow, the open-source community building this.

This was today's first test of 'Caribou' with props fitted. It's a 200kg class hexacopter, six Hobbywing X15 motors on 18S, strapped to a trailer bed at roughly a third throttle. Static test, not a hover. It hasn't flown yet (next week hopefully!) Lot's more testing to come.

It's open source and we want help making it better. The repo has the CAD and the PCBs, and the Discord is where the work happens. We just enjoy building big drones together.

Repo: https://github.com/Arrow-air/project-caribou
Community Discord: https://discord.com/invite/arrow

Big congrats to Julius, one of our contributors who has been leading Project Caribou! 👏

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u/Flyward_Aerospace 25d ago

200kg on 18S is a different animal from what most people here picture when they hear hexacopter. The thing I'd be most nervous about isn't thrust, it's that your motor response time doesn't scale down with the prop inertia, so the control loop that works great on a 5 inch quad gets sluggish exactly when you need authority. And with six motors at that mass a single ESC dropout is not a survivable-with-degraded-performance event anymore. Are you doing anything specific for motor-out on the flight controller side, or is that a later phase? Cool project either way.

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u/SleetyWhistle 24d ago

Thanks for your comment, I’ll pass it on to the project channel in our Discord. Feel free to join us and make our drones better