Haha, never seen a Tri made from a quad frame. Very clever. I also have the exact same board, but can't get it working. :( I might just default to my trusty KK2.0 board. How do you fry a gyro? Did ya hook it up wrong when it was live or something?

You seen those collective pitch quads now? One motor in the middle drives a shaft, which divides out to the arms via belts like in a helicopter? Well most quads have a run time of like 10 minutes, imagine if you put a 4-stroke engine on that frame, the energy stored in nitro fuel is much higher than in a battery when compared to weight. Wonder how long flights we could achieve with a setup like that.

Flight-time can also be based off trial-and-error of what mAh battery you need, until eventually your flight time starts dropping. Even though I can get 18-20 mins out of my 400-size quad, when you do FPV flying, even 7 minutes feels craaaaaazy long. usually by time i hit 12 minutes im just like ehhh i wanna land. get a new battery, feel unlimited..and go crazy.. xD

There's so much truth to that. I don't fly my T-copter like that since I only have one set of batteries for it, but I do that with my zagnutz flying wing. I get around 20-25 minutes of flight with 2000mah, but when I'm at the field I just switch them every 15-20 minutes and put the old pack on the charger. Since I have a two port charger, I can fly about as quickly as I can charge them. I should be able to do the same with the tri if I get more batteries. During the indoor season, I will fly in an armory and sometimes fly for an hour or more with my only breaks being battery switches or the occasional crash where I just grab a different plane and fly some more. It's not uncommon for me to have a small "graveyard" of planes on my table since I like to fly them all until they crash, then repair them all at once.

The frame originally started out as a quad with a KK2.0 until the KK gyros caused a crash that broke a boom and ruined a bearing in a motor. I had troubles getting the multiwii board to work as well, but it turned out to be that megapirate NG just doesn't like it. Instead, I've been running multiwii which supports almost everything that megapirate does except for a few rarely used features like follow-me mode which uses a phone linked to the quad to act as a beacon it follows. The gyro didn't fail, the GPS did. I don't know how I did, but it blinks it's light to say it has a 3D fix, but doesn't send out any NMEA sentences. I don't think I wired it wrong because I've always checked that wire to make sure it wasn't connected wrong, but it still acts dead. I have seen the CP quads you are talking about, but I don't think a nitro engine would work well in that application. It would vibrate a lot more and cause issues with the FC board, not to mention the camera vibrations. It's bearable on a plane since the wings can neutralize some vibrations, but the quads just don't have the mass or surface area to cancel them out. If that issue could be fixed, the flight time might be able to increase a bit, but I have no real need for that much flight time.

Nice nice. I think its always fun to take a project and re-amp it over and over again for improvements and such. :)

This is definitely a revamp type project. I've been building, reprogramming, and rebuilding this thing for a couple years now and I think I probably only have 3 hours total flight time on it during that whole time.