Posted on

Dubious GY-85 boards and HMC5883L fix

I ordered 3 different GY-85 boards from 3 different suppliers to find that all of them had the wrong magnetometer in them. Some even advertised their product with the HMC5883L chipset on them, but when they arrived they where the QMC5883L chipset.

After all this effort to find something without the shipping cost / time from the USA I decided to just get the HMC5883L individually and attach it to the I2C bus of the GY-85 board. The individual boards is called the GY-271. I found this supplier in Chullora in Sydney:
GY-271 HMC5883L
It worked just fine and now the head tracker is working.
You’ll see in the image below that the Honeywell HMC5883L chip is defined with the markings

Where as the 6th page of the QMC 5883L manual shows the markings something like

QMC5883L datasheet

HMC5883L datasheet

Using the GY-271 compass board by itself

(Also posted in RC groups)

Posted on

Long range flying and what this dB stuff means.


The video also points out how sensitive the human ear is.

P = power in Watts (W) = Work / time


J = Joules = an energy measurement.

Work(J) = Force * Distance

Force = measured in Newtons (N)

1N =  about 102grams * gravity

The actual formula being

F = m * a

Force = mass * acceleration








Posted on

Urban Aeronautics

A very interesting video from the Vertical Flight Society.

So I was initially thinking about 2 rotors like this for Sentach except running port / starboard rather than fore and aft. The thing is that the application is different. I’d like to take Sentach out to 300ish knots for small payloads and get 1000km range. Smaller payloads require a smaller vehicle. Thus we can stay with the wing model and use VTOL not for hovering so much as just punching off the ground and not needing a runway.