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Pictures? And components listing?
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Jun 1, 2011 20:55
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I am waiting on a CNC router to arrive so I thought I would brush up on my Sketchup skills. It's going to be a plywood tricopter frame using aluminum spacers as pivots for the two folding arms. KKblackboard for a fligth controller and hobbyking motors and speed controllers.
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Jun 24, 2011 22:06
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I searched for one of these threads awhile ago, glad to see one got started. I just started flying got a supercub LP last year. Occasionally I put a keyfob camera on it : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olfPyXzbBJg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M953XVQVWeY
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Jun 26, 2011 04:00
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For a beginner who knows NOTHING about RC vehicles/planes/copters, how much does would it cost to get beginners started?
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Jun 30, 2011 20:12
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Doing what? It's such a vague question. I'll go ahead and assume you'd like to try flying things, and since I like helicopters a lot here's my suggestion to a complete beginner:  It's not expensive and you would have everything you need to get flying inside (don't even try to take it outside). If you crash it and break something that can't be fixed by a pair of pliers and time then I'd suggest you get a new one, those things are way too cheap to get parts for. I'll leave the plane answers to more knowledge people.
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Jun 30, 2011 20:41
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if you want to be on the cheap side and like fixed wings more then helicopters (like I do), check for the AirHogs biplane which should set you back only 20 bucks and comes with a remote. Fun small plane that can be flown outdoors and indoors. Got me hooked to the hobby. For more serious flying, go to Harbor Freight and buy a "Wild hawk". This one: http://www.harborfreight.com/easy-to-fly-wild-hawk-rc-airplane-94774.html It is not precise, underpowered and lacking a decent remote - but that thing flies decently enough outside to make the hobby fun. Make sure you have enough weight in its nose, if you balance it, set the centre of gravity (use two giners under its wings to find it) to about a third from the beginning of the wings edge. Better half an inch to far in front then in the back! That thing can carry these cheap keycams you can get on ebay for 10bucks. Cheapest way to get aerial videos done. If you want a real great way to start flying, buy a Multiplex Easystar foamie, a decent remote like a Spektrum DX6i, charger and batteries from Hobbycity and fly at a local airfield. The Easystar looks a lot like the Harbor freight plane, but is way more solid and german engineered.  Also much more crash resistant. I flew mine into a powerline. All it lost was a bit of foam which I glued back on using spare foam from a TV set packaging. And that was *all* that broke on it. Tough little fucker. Still use mine for aerial videos...
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Jul 10, 2011 22:58
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I've moved on from my micro heli to some fixed wing foamies and I'm having a blast! I built up a Floater Jet which I highly recommend as a first FPV plane. It very cheap from hobbyking.com and is very very tough. It's fast and agile as well as a good glider.   Then I lost it flying along a cliff:  I got an offer to search for my plane from a fellow FPVer with a Cessna! Couldn't turn that chance down and the search was successful! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3JbWsFulBk But I made some sweet vids with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXpuTCekeXI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMiA2tCurl4 SENTRY from FPVLab took pity on my lost plane and shipped me a brand new Easystar! I transferred the gear I salvaged from my Floater and cut ailerons and got back in the air! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x9NCYRaSTY We recently had a Colorado FPV meetup down near South Park and camped out for the weekend. I was able to get some really cool chase footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBWiSr_A33Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed83QMVMp0E Now I'm working on a new plane. Last weekend I visited one of my new FPV buddies down in Durango and we sliced out some new wings. It's a flying wing just shy of a 50" wingspan. We cut it out of foam he found in his garage and the covering is a lightweight tarp he found in the dumpster behind Home Depot. The budget wing: 
Vitamin J fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Aug 4, 2011 |
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Aug 4, 2011 18:02
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What features do you guys think are needed in RC/FPV equipment yet. I've been getting some ideas together for a 2.4 Ghz SDR transceiver that uses some different encoding techniques. Kind of an all in one that will do whatever you want with 2.4 ghz signals. Should be able to read half the 2.4 ghz band at a time, 1 usb, and some I/O for driving servos, esc, etc. Plus the ability to transmit at about the same level. One idea is to use them to transmit in a chain for farther range. Also I have some ideas for virtual MIMO, so if you have multiple planes flying in an area they can act together as a single larger antenna (simplification).
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Aug 4, 2011 19:47
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The Mimo thing wont be of much use unless you have a whole slew of guys buy into it at your field and that is really unlikely to happen. A good quality video/telemetry system would be nice but use 5.8 ghz so you avoid the 2.4 ghz band used for control.
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Aug 4, 2011 22:13
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I would never buy a product that do both the RX and the FPV system. That stuff needs to be separate and have their own battery etc.
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Aug 4, 2011 22:34
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Vitamin J posted:Then I lost it flying along a cliff: That looks totally repairable. Gorilla glue.  This is my p-51. You can see the first seam line where I snapped it in half doing a nose dive.  This is the result of the first flight after that. It actually broke in a completely different spot further back, mid air. I believe the wing detached and the rotation of it disconnecting snapped the fuselage. I've since repaired the plane again, and now have glued the wing to the fuselage, and it flies great still.  This is my scratch built 3d foamie I'm working on. This is just a mock up to see how it looks. Based on the extra 300 profiles, but everything else is 100% 'wingin it' in CAD/sketchup.  Still trying to come up with what I want to do with the rudder/elevator... trying to come up with something a little different than what most people are doing with profile planes.
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Aug 5, 2011 03:00
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IsaacNewton posted:I would never buy a product that do both the RX and the FPV system. That stuff needs to be separate and have their own battery etc. Why? If you lose either, you are probably crashing. At least with something like this you could set a fail safe mode. How often are LiPos failing? If its an issue I could always add a second battery connector and some sort of isolation system in case one shorts. Also it would be pretty easy to have better power management in a unit like this. Drop camera down to low resolution and transmit fewer frames. Or shut down all tx and autopilot home if there is a gps hooked up. Working in the 5 ghz bands seems like a hazard, it can fade out pretty bad in NLOS. I'll have to try out both more than likely or if I can find a reasonable priced dual band mixer. I kind of see this as a stepping stone item. I'd really like to see the ability to pull in other bands on the RX side so I can do aircraft see and avoid. But that will take a more expensive adc, which is a major cost of this type of radio. I think I'll aim to make this more of a experimenter platform. SDKs that people can use to dump their own code on the cpu.
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Aug 5, 2011 03:50
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The likelyhood of both system failing at the same time is quite low. It's much easier (perhaps only on the mind) to trust the systems independently than it is to thrust them both together. Could very likely be just me though and like you said if you double up your system it would likely fix all issues. Did anyone catch this on Cake Boss? It's unbelievably dangerous, the dude go ahead and flip the Idle up switch right then and there, unkowing of what it does and with the heli surrounded by people. Can you imagine that happening with a 600+ sized heli? He would have lost his leg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eCn0NA84RA
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Aug 10, 2011 16:22
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Has anyone flown the Litehawk XL? http://www.litehawk.ca/discover%20litehawk%20xl.html It looks very moddable and I'm thinking that I could get one of those cheap keyfob cameras from ebay and splice its guts into the copter. I was looking at the Airhogs Hawkeye recently but it looks a bit crappy (only 2 channels), I think I would get pissed off with it pretty quickly.
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Aug 11, 2011 19:57
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That heli looks pretty cool but it's still only 3 channels and a micro coax. 3 channels means you can fly forwards and backwards and steer with the rudder but you can't strafe sideways or move at an angle, which is the whole point of a heli imo. You should look for a used MCX, that at least is 4 channels and has a swashplate so it's similar to a real heli. You're gonna get bored fast though so don't spend a lot on a coax. ease posted:That looks totally repairable. Gorilla glue.
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Aug 11, 2011 22:20
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Vitamin J posted:That heli looks pretty cool but it's still only 3 channels and a micro coax. 3 channels means you can fly forwards and backwards and steer with the rudder but you can't strafe sideways or move at an angle, which is the whole point of a heli imo. You've got me thinking now. I may just go hog wild and get a "proper" heli... Also the keyfob camera weighs 35 grams, quite a bit more than I thought. Even if I strip it down I'm not sure that a micro heli will be able to lift it, and even if it does, the already paltry battery life will become ridiculously short. My main goal is to get a camera in the air, and I live in the woods, so a heli makes more sense than a fixed wing.
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Aug 12, 2011 15:24
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You can definitely lift a key fob camera with a medium sized coax. I lifted one with 2 birthday sized helium balloons. Whats your experience with helis? Flying a collective pitch or even a fixed pitch heli is really really hard. The problem with a coax is that it can't handle wind at all. Even if your sheltered by trees, as soon as you get above them a 2mph wind is going to take that thing away and you'll probably never see it again (speaking from a sad experience here).
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Aug 12, 2011 17:13
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ease posted:Whats your experience with helis? As far as helis go, I am a Raw Noob. I have some fixed wing RC flight experience but I'm told that flying a heli is a completely different kettle of ball games. Maybe I should just go with balloons!
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Aug 12, 2011 17:24
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helno posted:I am waiting on a CNC router to arrive so I thought I would brush up on my Sketchup skills. Remember this? It now exists.
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Aug 16, 2011 02:18
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helno posted:Remember this? It now exists. It's a beautiful thing. Also: against advice, I bought a Litehawk XL. Oh poo poo I love it. Now I am hooked. If this is babby's first heli, I just cannot wait to suckle on the teat of the helicopter mothership.
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Aug 17, 2011 01:39
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ease posted:The problem with a coax is that it can't handle wind at all. Even if your sheltered by trees, as soon as you get above them a 2mph wind is going to take that thing away and you'll probably never see it again (speaking from a sad experience here). Err yeah. I learned my lesson today. I was going great guns, I had shifted the CoG on the Litehawk XL so it could make good headway outdoors, and I took it above the treeline. It started lazily drifting up, and away. Whatever I did, it kept going up, until it got to the edge of its range and switched off, then got back in range and switched on again. I couldn't push back against the breeze. Within about 15 seconds I realised that the heli was beyond my control and I cut the main rotor for a second or two, then reapplied full power. I knew it would land somewhere in the woods. I cut the power again and went to look for it. I staggered around in the dense woods for a while, wiggling the throttle occasionally in the hope that I could hear it thrash around, but no dice. I gained a false hope at one point because a distant cow decided that it would moo in a strangely motor-ish fashion whenever I wiggled the throttle. I nearly lost a shoe in a swamp. I headed back home, dejected. When it got dark, I headed out again, and by pure luck I spotted a dim flicker. It was the heli's flashing LED reflected off some leaves, deep in the woods. I thought it was a firefly at first but I struck out in the general direction and then noticed it flash again, with a different colour. It could have ended up high in a tree, it could have easily ended up in water, but nope, it landed on nice bouncy forest floor. I burrowed through the trees and recovered it, and escaped with only one insect bite. The lesson that I learned: READ THREAD. DO NOT DISREGARD ADVICE
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Aug 18, 2011 02:54
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhIrHe9wmT4 It flew! Did a second flight Sunday after toning down the controls and adding expo, loved it! Glides amazingly well and it crazy fast. Vertical performance no problem with a Turnigy 2836 2350kv. No video because my friend overstated his camera's ability and no video is better than the video I have.
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Aug 22, 2011 20:50
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Here's my cub with it's 60" wing from an Apprentice :
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Aug 23, 2011 23:36
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Air Hogs are bringing out a new plane with a camera in it: the Hawk Eye Blue Sky. It runs on 2.4GHz and the plane can transmit battery and memory capacity info back to the controller. It's a very basic foamy, no control surfaces, it's flown by controlling the speed of the two props. The camera looks pretty lovely compared to a keyfob camera... but.. $65! Looks pretty good for the monies. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UyyLkOAiRY
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Aug 25, 2011 14:34
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That thing is going to get destroyed with any amount of wind tho. That thing is going to make a lot of little kids cry. Edit : hmm, maybe not, those motors sounds like they are cranking, and the reviewer said he was flying it in a few mph winds with some guts.
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Aug 25, 2011 14:40
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Finished my wing:  Flies great! Calculated the level flight speed to be around 50 to 60mph  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG4iqIuxe0Y Vitamin J fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Aug 25, 2011 |
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Aug 25, 2011 20:03
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5OZCWaJBdc Rather amazing headtracking POV F-16!
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Aug 30, 2011 20:17
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Wow, just discovered this thread. I've been flying R/C since the early 2000's, and have always had a GWS Slow Stick somewhere in the mix. They're just great planes. Anyway, earlier in the summer, I built one up to carry my GoPro.  She's heavy, and far from a stock Slow Stick these days, but it flies well, and takes pretty drat good video all things considered. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zW0AFWN32k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pans1ssB-0I
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Aug 31, 2011 22:51
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I started flying sometime in the early 90's. I've not been able to keep ships around very well. Well Yesterday I bought a MCX. .... and I found out the controller was compatable with the ultra series of parkzone planes. Knock $30 off a $120 airplane and i'm there. I took home my t-28. And proceeded to do something hilariously stupid. The winds today are 5-17mph variable. And my flight area is small, and surrounded by 50' trees. That means it's turbulent as hell. Enough that when I was learning to fly gliders I learned to punch through the turbulence zone so I could land. ......... Four battery packs later, I'd finally damaged the T-28 enough that I had to give it up for the night. As it turns out, I can fly 4 channel ships without any real trouble. I'm pretty pleased with myself. I'm sitting here with elmers glue on my fingers and waiting for my repairs to dry. I think I'm happy with this plane. And I expect to fly it much more. Maybe I'll have enough balls to take my 4 channel heli out there.
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Sep 6, 2011 03:28
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The T-28 is a great plane. I flew one all last year, as my first 4-channel plane. It was so tempting to be stupid with it that, well, I was, and eventually it was destroyed beyond comprehension. The motor and ESC live on in the above Slow Stick though. Some day I'll buy another T-28, they're pretty awesome.
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Sep 7, 2011 21:28
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I remember seeing a video of some multi rotor helis performing some insanely precise aerobatics. Like flying through a slot in plywood while doing a loop. Does anyone know what I'm talking about, and where to find the video? Durr, I think I answered my own question, check out these videos. Insane. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM&feature=channel_video_title http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geqip_0Vjec&feature=related ease fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Sep 9, 2011 |
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Sep 9, 2011 14:27
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ease posted:I remember seeing a video of some multi rotor helis performing some insanely precise aerobatics. Like flying through a slot in plywood while doing a loop. Does anyone know what I'm talking about, and where to find the video? I've always considered these videos cheating. They are using a lab full of high-precision IR cameras to locate the vehicle and doing a lot of processing off of the platform. It would be more impressive if the vehicle was able to do these things 'in the wild', so to speak.
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Sep 9, 2011 19:45
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Delta-Wye posted:I've always considered these videos cheating. They are using a lab full of high-precision IR cameras to locate the vehicle and doing a lot of processing off of the platform. It would be more impressive if the vehicle was able to do these things 'in the wild', so to speak. It would also be scary as hell, really.
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Sep 9, 2011 22:33
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Phat_Albert posted:It would also be scary as hell, really. We really aren't that far off from that being the case though. I swear I saw some video of a MR doing more hard core stuff, like barrel rolls through gaps and what not. Not really sure if it was autonomous or not.
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Sep 10, 2011 01:57
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Precise maneuvering requires precise positioning information and that isn't easy, or cheap. A dead reckoning inertial measurement unit is only simple in theory; in a real life flying platform there are all kinds of noise sources like vibrations that throw gyroscopes and accelerometers off over time. But, as processing power increases, the cost and size of electronics come down and become more and more affordable, you can cram all kinds of poo poo in an electronic brain. Even today hobbyists can easily field equipment that would shame a military piece of kit from the cold war. Still, all those precise maneuvers require either a good pilot or external sensors and processing in a lab. And lots and lots of retakes. But still, Skynet lurks: http://robots.net/article/3229.html
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Sep 11, 2011 04:17
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I've seen efforts to work the Kinect platform onto RC aerial vehicles, and I think that may be the way forward. CV is a bitch, but stereoscopic vision makes it relatively easy to pick out openings and stuff.
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Sep 11, 2011 05:37
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Lessons of the day: #1 Change your transmitter batteries frequently. I was flying... and lost control. That sick in the pit of your stomach, sheer terror, that comes from noticing nothing you're doing actually is affecting the flight of your plane. That crash ended in a battery coming loose. And ripping the connector off. Which proceeded to short out and smoke. ... $8 of 150mah lipo down the toilet. #2 If you crash once due to lack of control, don't just fly closer, replace those batteries. ...... I gave up after that crash. I am STILL loving this ultra-micro t-28.
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Sep 12, 2011 05:21
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Are you using the TX that came with it, or a standalone one?
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Sep 12, 2011 23:14
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The one that came with it. It's not amazing. As I am finding out, flying with the landing gear on is like flying with airbrakes on. The plane will fly at 1/3 throttle, easily, without the landing gear, it needs 2/3 with the gear on. I also stuck it in a tree today. ... retrieval was by basketball. Woo, more damage.
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Sep 13, 2011 01:48
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The thread in AI is probably the place for this, but since you're talking about UM T-28's, I figure I'd chime in and say I'm probably pulling the trigger on a UMX Beast today. Cant wait! Also pulling the trigger on Phoenix flight sim software so I dont instantly wad it up.
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Sep 13, 2011 14:10
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