First Flight
Having watched more than a few videos of FBL heli tipping over on the ground during maiden, naturally, I was excited and nervous. The exact same feeling you get when learning to hover for the time. Fortunately, maiden went without drama. All I did was hover and hover and more hover.
Second Flight
Then it came time to get the headspeed up to where I usually fly-2250rpm. Again, I was filled with anxiety because I had read about FBL heli tipping over when switching to idle up simply because of the vibration inducing weird behavior. Took a deep breath, flipped the idle-up switch and it started wobbling. The exact same wobble I get when hitting the resonance headspeed of the damper. Regardless, I took it up for a few flips and rolls. Things were fine, it just felt disconnected and weird, negatively weird.
Subsequent flights....
Having turned down the cyclic gain, the wobble was gone. However, the heli developed a slight vibration, similar to that from the RJX flybarred head that I was running. After a whole day of troubleshooting, I found the problem source. I had over-tighten the blades. In hindsight, the rjx flybarred head was probably fine in the first place with the vibe coming from over-tightened blades. The heli flew exactly like a flybarred heli. I was initally worried that my piro-flips and piro-tic-tocs will be affected, but test flight shown my worrys to be unfound. The BeastX was ran in sports mode, which some have commented to have slow rates. Yet, I found it to be pretty good. The piro and cyclic rates are similar to what I usually run. Only issue I had was that it seem there was a little too much expo softening the cyclic around neutral. So I might go "pro" mode soon.
The biggest difference between FBL and flybarred is the variation in roll and pitch rate with headspeed and airspeed. In a FBL heli, the cyclic response for a given cyclic input is the same regardless of whether you are stationary, doing FFF, running a super high headspeed or doing autorotation. Whereas in flybarred heli, the faster the heli, the faster the cyclic repsonse will be. Similarly, cyclic reponse will sharpen and increase with more headspeed. Because I have been flying the flybar for 10 years now, my fingers have been conditioned to this fact, which meant that there were some unexpected moments in the few test flights. For instance, in an auto after the flight, the cyclic sticks can get shockingly sensitive as compared to what I am used to. Another hairy moment was trying to pull out from a very fast tail slide, where a little elevator input would have been sufficient for a flybarred heli, but not quite for a FBL one.
Setup is actually very simple. Just follow the given instruction with a little bit of common sense and it is done. There is no need for any fancy transmitter mixing or compensation or settings. I left the cyclic servos update rate on the default 50hz and the heat sink was already getting warm to touch after 3mins of hard 3d. So I guess the recommended 200Hz might be too much and I don't think I want to try it at the moment. It seems that FBL really does put some load on the cyclic servos. Being lazy, I left the logitech 6100g servo in the e-raptor and ran it on 960us 333hz. As usual, it is running pretty hot.
I do agree that FBL is the future, just like electrics over nitros, but you probably won't catch me with a FBL conversion on my 700N any time soon. I don't hate FBL, but it is just that I can't really feel the difference between a good flybarred setup and a FBL one. At least not significant enough to justify the extra money spent and extra load on the servos and BEC.
