3S Class

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Airgineers 3S Class is an adrenaline-fuelled ride that is all about learning to fly fast and to fly safely. Students will need to build the drone before learning to fly and as their piloting skills progress, they will need to understand how to tune their drone to get the best performance. Pilots will need to control their drone from First Person View (FPV) which means they will wear goggles that have a video feed directly from their drone – to the pilot, it feels like they are sat right in the cockpit.

The 3S Class challenge is conducted in a time-trial format. Each team will have numerous attempts to complete the time-trial course in the fastest time possible. The fastest teams will then battle it out in a head-to-head final to see who is declared the winner!

What is a 3S Drone?

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A 3S Drone is a high-speed, high performance racing drone designed predominantly for outdoor use. The 3S part of the name comes from the battery that is used in Airgineers which is a 3-cell lithium polymer battery rated at 11.1v. Airgineers permits a maximum of a 250-sized racing drone to be used. The Tyrant-S that Airgineers supply is a 215 size chassis which is the optimal size for ease of build and performance. A 3S drone is made up from a number of key components:

Micro Class Drone
  1. Camera: A small video camera that is used to see the First Person View (FPV), as if the pilot was onboard the Drone
  2. Propeller: 4 propellers are used to provide thrust which moves the drone
  3. Video Transmitter Antenna: Used by the Video Transmitter to broadcast a 5.8GHz video signal to the FPV goggles
  4. Motor: 4 motors are used and are connected directly to each of the propellers
  5. Electronic Speed Controller (ESC): The ESC takes a signal from the Flight Controller and converts it to voltage to control the speed of the motors
  6. Flight Controller (FC): The brain of the drone. It has accelerometer and gyroscope sensors that detect the movement of the drone. This data is combined with the inputs from the pilot and the flight controller which will then work out what signals need to be sent to each motor
  7. Video Transmitter (VTX): Takes a signal from the camera and converts it to a suitable 5.8GHz signal to send to the FPV goggles worn by the pilot
  8. Receiver (RX): Receives data from the pilot's transmitter using the 2.4GHz frequency. This data is then passed to the flight controller for processing
  9. Battery: A lithium polymer battery used to power the electronics and motors on the drone

What equipment do you need to take part?

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Airgineers are able to supply everything that is required through Rapid Education. A number of starter kits are available as well as any spare parts that you might need in case anything gets damaged.

Visit Rapid Education to purchase.

Downloads

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BetaFlightBetaFlight

Open source software for configuring multirotor aircraft. Betaflight is compatible with the Airgineers 3S and Micro Drone flight controllers as well as almost every other flight controller on the market.

Betaflight is an extension for Google Chrome so requires Chrome to be installed first.


BLHeli ConfiguratorBLHeli Configurator

BLHeli Configurator is required for setting up the electronic speed controllers on the Tyrant 3S Class drone. Like Betaflight, it is an extension for Google Chrome.

Rules

Please find the 3S Class Rules here.

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