Swashplateless Helicopter (Patreon)

Hope everyone is well! I've been busy working on a helicopter that uses a single motor for control. Conventional helicopters require servo controlled swashplates to adjust the blade angle during it's rotation. However, this setup varies the motor torque causing the blades to lead/lag, which adjusts the blade angle due to the 45 degree hinge. It's taken a lot of problem solving to get this system working and I've just test flown it today for the first time (it still needs quite a bit of tuning). Now I need to put everything into a final video, but first, a quick run down of the system. 

 The motor is a standard brushless motor (Tarot 4006) and is controlled with an off the shelf drone speed controller (T-motor F35A). There is a diametric magnet epoxied to the bottom of the motor shaft, and a magnetic encoder mounted 2mm below it. This measures the exact angle of the motor 2500 per second (75 measurements per rotation @2000RPM). Then a Teensy 3.6 board runs an arduino code to read the angle and apply a Sine/Cos wave output to the throttle setting. The amplitude of the Sin/Cos wave determines the amount of roll/pitch control. This throttle output value is then sent to the motor controller 500 times per second and acheives full cyclic control!

Here is the original source of this concept: https://youtu.be/aEPf0QHVuMM