Installing a gimbal

[Tony Read 2]

Very.

This tale of woe does have a happy ending though.

Got a Blade GB200 gimbal for my Blade 350 QX. What should have taken 15 minutes to instal must have taken 15 hours!

First of all I tried it without a remote receiver fitted (the tilt function wont work on a V1 or V2 350 without said receiver). It took up a 10 degree down tilt and a 5 degree sideways lean. I was not too concerned about the forward tilt as this would mean that the props would not be in view. I was more concerned about the sideways lean.

I took the sensor board out of the bottom of the gimbal and re-seated it many, many times. No better. I contacted HH UK who really did not know much about the gimbal. They said to send it back to the shop. I thought that it must be the sensor but there is no way to adjust its settings, so I propped up one end with a small sliver of card and all was well. Phew!

Next came to installing the receiver. This was easypeasy so all that was left to do was to bind the 350 and the new receiver together. That's when I hit a bit of a brick wall. I could not get the 350 or the receiver to bind at the same time. It was one or the other. On 50 attempts I was successful on 2 occasions, but on powering down the remote immediately lost its bind. Doh!

I phoned HH UK again but they were stumped. I did some research on the WWW and found that the most likely cause was the firmware on the gimbal. There is an update which is available and HH.com kindly give you a link to it on their website. Unfortunately it does not exist! It is to be found on the Bladehelis.com website instead. You download an instruction sheet and a .BIN file which my PC would not recognise. I found out that you also need to download the multirotor utility as well.

This done the firmware upgrade took just a few seconds, however I kept getting the error message 'device did not respond in time' Grrrr! I tried and tried again but always the same message. At this point I had had enough and thought I'd give it a try. Both the 350 and the remote bound first time! What';s more they retained their bind even after powering down. Sorted!

The moral of this storey is that if you have a V1 or V2 350QX and you want to use the GB200 gimbal (which is very nice IMHO) upload the new firmware. Don't bother looking at Youtube vids where people have just put everything together and it worked first time, do the upgrade and all will be well.

 

Edited By Tony Read 2 on 01/12/2014 13:30:22