As FPV pilots we spend a lot of time building and tuning our drones. There are various tricks to get a quadcopter to fly super smoothly, from soft mounting to RPM filtering, but there’s a new trick on the block.
Quadcopters are basically flying vibration machines. Over the past few years the code (firmware) that runs our quads has vastly improved. You can pretty much make anything fly nowadays by slapping four motors on it and using a flight controller. Granted, not everything will fly well. To do that you need a combination of things. First, you need a nice stiff frame that carries the least amount of vibration from your motors, down the arms and into the flight controller. Second, you need twisted wires, good capacitors, good (i.e. not busted up) motors, and some filter/PID tuning. Some builds will fly great on a stock tune, and even better with a tweaked one.
With all that in mind, the FPV community is always trying to figure out how to make tuning easier and how to make our quads fly even better. This week there’s been a new development in the building and tuning process.
Mechanical dampening grease
Applying a thin layer of grease in between each touching surface will dampen any vibrations traveling between them. While “greasing up a drone” might sound silly, this idea is brought to us by aerospace engineer turned FPV pilot Chris Rosser. He’s done some serious research on the way frames behave on our FPV quads. You might have seen some of his frame resonance analysis videos.
As Chris explains, the trick is to use the right kind of high viscosity mechanical dampening grease. NyoGel PG-44A works best, with Nyogel 767a being the cheaper alternative. Apply a thin layer of grease in between every pair of touching surfaces, and that includes under every screw head. Also lubricate the screw threads themselves to stop them from backing out.
And that’s it! You should see improvement in your blackbox logs like the one above. We are eagerly waiting for the follow-up video from Chris, as well as looking forward to seeing other people’s results. I’m waiting on my own order of some Nyogel PG-44A to see this improvement for myself.
Have you tried greasing your quads? Let us know down in the comments!
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