LM317T Voltage Regulator with Pass Transistor

This is a quick hop around the park for the Peace Drone XR. I had hoped to have a 30-minute duration FPV flier, but it turns out this plane flies quite a bit differently when heavily loaded. With 6600mAh worth of battery, FPV gear, OSD, landing gear, and upgraded motor, it tops 2000g AUW. This necessitates flying relatively fast to hold level flight and takes away from the stable, locked-in feel I enjoyed with previous, lighter versions of the Peace Drone. I think I will re-designate this a medium-range hand-launched FPV plane and get the weight back down to 1600g. I have a continuing struggle with landing gear. As much as I try to avoid them I felt this plane was a little too heavy to hand-launch, so I forced myself to make it even more heavy with landing gear.....and they still broke........twice! The Lawmate 2.4GHz video transmitter is a great unit but demands very smooth power. I tried 4 BECs, all combination of filters, ferrite chokes, and capacitors, even made a linear voltage regulator from scratch. None worked well. The $20 voltage regulator from New Generation Hobbies did the trick! The Nova OSD has a nice display, easy setup, and seems to work well. However the stabilization and return-to-home functions are notoriously unreliable, as it turns out. The RTH also demands the servos be physically installed in the aircraft in a certain orientation in order to work, and it's not the intuitive mirror-image orientation I used for the PD elevons. Not a hard fix, but I ...



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