The "dead fish" flight control algorithm may not be FAA approved

No photos this time, sorry, I was too busy keeping my finger perched on the "/" key (which shuts down the flight control system and all the motors) to take any photos or videos...

So I set the flight control parameters to some reasonable seeming values, held my breath, and slowly turned up the collective gain (overall thrust). I think the longest flight I had was a second long, maybe two, before I would panic and shut everything off. I definitely made a number of propeller gouges in the foam pads...

One-second hop-and-flop flights aren't the best way to tune the feedback parameters. I did get it into a fascinating mode where it really was flopping about like a dead fish -- technically this is oscillation from having the proportional gain on the pitch and roll too high -- but actually failed to crash entirely for quite a while, though it was bouncing on its floor pads continuously. Also, there's a lot of friction between the bits of foam strapped to its underbody and the foam pads on the ground, which means that whenever it comes into contact with the ground it tends to tip over. (I see why a lot of people's experimental rotorcraft have ping-pong balls on sticks for landing gear.)

Some rig that somehow held it safely fixed in place but let it pivot freely through a wide range of pitch, roll, and yaw would be fantastic. I'm not quite sure how to arrange that. Failing that, maybe I should take it to some larger space (the cafeteria at work, on a weekend?) and give it more room to flop about while I tune all the parameters?

I'm reminded of learning to fly the original Draganflyer, a quadrotor with some basic stabilization but mostly manual control. We would practice in the cafe of our New York office, which didn't have particularly high ceilings or open spaces, and mostly be frustrated with our total lack of ability to do anything, so we would keep it very close to the floor and constantly power down just before it ran into the wall. Only here I'm tweaking code, not control sticks.