Come R/C enthusiasts, represent!

I picked up my new [size=2](to me)[/size] Mini Titan e325 yesterday. Sorry for the crappy pic, but I couldn't be bothered to set up my tripod.

IMAGE(http://mantisonthemountain.com/bits/helis.jpg)

I've played with the S107 a bit. Its stability and control are incredible, given that it's a $30 micro-RC gyrocopter. My 2 year-old flew it for a bit as well, and aside from some signaling issues (we were outside) she had no trouble with it either.

I finally got the RC10 rolling as well. It took longer than expected because NiMH cells are larger than the old NiCads so modern battery pack don't fit in the car. I ended up removing the battery clip, moving the steering servo, and securing the battery with high-strength velcro. The next issue appears to be that my old electronic speed control overheats from the higher discharge NiMH cells after a while--an issue I never had with NiCads. I'm going to stick with it for now and see how annoying this gets though, as I really don't want to buy a new speed control for what's become a knock-around car. Still runs great however, and I expect to drive it until I break something that can't be replaced.

How's the 325 fly! Cool!

rabbit wrote:

How's the 325 fly! Cool!

Waaaay better than I expected. I was worried because it's a little smaller than I was originally planning on going with and what I've mainly been practicing with on the simulator. Larger birds are more stable, but more expensive to build up and to repair. The 450 class, which this one falls in, seems to be a good balance of stability and cost. So far I've successfully hovered for four packs and the only casualty is a cracked set of skids. That's only because I was dealing with some mild wind gusts and smacked it to the ground trying to compensate for the changing lift. I plan on just working on hovering right now while I practice forward flight on the simulator.

[Edit] I just remembered you fly helis so I'm not telling you anything new about size equaling stability, but I'll leave the post as is for anyone else. I was wanting to go with a 500 size heli but I'm on holiday recovery budget and would've had to wait until next month. Hopefully by summer I'll get a bigger one up, maybe even a 600.

It's an interesting size. For sure, learning to fly for realz with a 60 inch rotor diameter made life a lot more stable -- but obviously a five foot circle of death is a lot more costly to maintain (and terrifying) than a 30 inch one. I flew a micro for a while until i beat it up too bad (can't remember the brand, it was one of the first full-collective micros, maybe an 18 inch rotor). Was pretty finicky to maintain, and definately too unstable to do much more than hover and run around the yard a bit.

Even if it was more stable though, i found the micro to be hard to orient. In a big field, I could for sure do plenty of tricks -- inverts, loops, whatnot -- but found orienting front/back to be hard once it was far enough away to safely move with enough speed to do any trick that needed momentum.

That was the beauty of the giant raptor -- you could ALWAYS tell what direction it was pointed.

I'm also curious how flying it electric would be. I imagine because of power drain, it actually gets harder to fly safely as the pack drains? Less "oh sh*t dump the collective" headroom? On the other hand, zero concerns about having it just completely crap out on you.

You flight guys definitely tempt me.

I have two more land projects I want to do, then I'll probably move into flight. I want to build a scale crawler, followed by purchasing a 2WD short course truck since it seems to be the "in" class for racing (which I've always watched but only done a leetle bit).

After that, though, I want to join the air crowd, too. My dad flew helicopters for the Army, and when he went with me to the hobby store the other day I caught the old feller eyeballing a full collective mini chopper. I'd like to get him one with a Huey body and paint it up like his old UH1H.

Post videos of you guys not wrecking! Give me reasons to make my old man spend his money so I can spend mine, too!

Also - Rabbit - concerning the electrics, I don't know how the flight models work. But since running a LiPo under 3.0 volts can permanently ruin the pack, land models usually have a hard cutoff that shuts off the model at a preset voltage, or failing that, at least a warning alarm to let you know you're running on electron fumes. I am not sure how that translates over to flight models - is the transmitter actually a transceiver? Does it tell you what the pack voltage is? Or is there a failsafe mode that puts the chopper/plane into a slow descent? Way more consequences in the air!

InspectorFowler wrote:

I want to build a scale crawler

Post up when you do! I'm checking out the crawling stuff now. I may build up an Axial XR10 relatively soon.

But since running a LiPo under 3.0 volts can permanently ruin the pack, land models usually have a hard cutoff that shuts off the model at a preset voltage, or failing that, at least a warning alarm to let you know you're running on electron fumes. I am not sure how that translates over to flight models - is the transmitter actually a transceiver? Does it tell you what the pack voltage is? Or is there a failsafe mode that puts the chopper/plane into a slow descent? Way more consequences in the air!

ESCs, at least good ones, are programmable. You use a soft-cutoff that reduces throttle but leaves your controls alone. My old electric plane turned off the prop, but you could throttle down then back up to restart it. That doesn't work on helis because your collective is mixed so it just reduces the throttle.

Telemetry is getting to be a big thing now. With that you can monitor pack voltage, and potentially engine temp, RPM, GPS, etc. The best practice is to figure out what kind of runtimes you get with your packs, then use a timer so that you're in a good position when you run low.

Ugh, let me just state for the record, "Today was not a good day to fly."

LiquidMantis wrote:

Ugh, let me just state for the record, "Today was not a good day to fly."

I said videos of you not wrecking.

This is one reason why I do often hesitate at the choppers and planes - a mistake, even at 40, on the ground, can mean as little as $5 in parts. Not so much for you guys.

Ok, need help getting this RC Plane (first I've ever dealt with) off the ground and into a tree.

I got the thing glued together and messed with the wiring until it seemed to work, but it seems weirdly off in a way I can't figure out. I have not messed with programming the controller on the PC, so maybe that is the solution.

Pictures of the problem,

http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/3935/rcplane.jpg

The problem is that when you press up on the right stick, it effects both elevation and turning. Its basically as if the stick is off by 45 degrees as shown in one of those pictures. Pushing the stick in those directions does what is indicated.

Note that nothing is plugged into the battery spot on the receiver and that there is an unused jumper cable that came with the kit. Do I need to plug the cable currently connected to throttle to the battery and then put the jumper on the throttle?

Controllable things include Wing Flaps, Tail Flaps, Front Wheel, and Fan.

Any help is appreciated.

First of, nomenclature. "Tail flaps" are elevators, the "wing flaps" you're referring to are ailerons, which are different from actual flaps. When you say turning right does the left aileron go down and the right up along with the elevator going up?

You've got four servos on it, 2 for the ailerons and two for the elevators. It looks like they just plug in on one receiver port so if you can't reverse the servo you may need to flip the servo horn so that the control surface travel is reversed as the servos are facing opposite directions.

Do you not need insurance to fly in the US?
Yes even models.
I think we have to join an association which requires some amount of buddy box flying, and gives you insurance.
I know my Dad did, but not sure if it was mandatory or not.

No insurance required, but it's a good idea to join AMA. You'll need it to join and fly at most any R/C flying club.

Maybe this will help with explaining the problem. Let me know if the table makes sense.

IMAGE(http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/5476/receivertable.gif)

I've been thinking about this but I've got nothing. Did the servos come double-ganged to the connector? If they came pre-connected at this point I'd open up the radio to see if anything stands out. In theory it shouldn't be possible, but maybe the gimbal assembly is skewed.

You didn't ask, but I'll volunteer that that plane doesn't look like a great first plane. It's going to be very twitchy and it looks like it'll be unforgiving when (not if) you crash.

Thanks for the suggestions. I don't really have any idea what you are talking about. My cousin (12 years old) got this for Christmas and I've been trying to help him get it ready to do something. I've never used these planes and neither has he or has the person who bought it.

The plane came mostly together with a few wires sticking into the compartment where the receiver is. I messed with these one at a time to try to get something to happen since there were no directions to tell me where to plug anything in.

I guess one last question is what that jumper is for. it would seem to me that the BATT connector should be connected to the connector that clearly gave power, but when I did that, none of the other functions worked. Do I need to connect that power connector to the BATT space, and put the jumper on the THRO space? I don't want to bust anything.

Lastly, my cousin sparked the receiver when he got it by putting the battery directly onto the receiver. I thought this would have ruined it, but it seems to mostly function. Not sure why it would mostly function and then have this bizarre behavior if something had gone wrong.

Thanks anyway.

PandaEskimo wrote:

I guess one last question is what that jumper is for. it would seem to me that the BATT connector should be connected to the connector that clearly gave power, but when I did that, none of the other functions worked. Do I need to connect that power connector to the BATT space, and put the jumper on the THRO space? I don't want to bust anything.

Nope, you can supply power to the receiver on any port. The dedicated battery jack is for nitro planes that have a small dedicated receiver battery pack. You're getting power from the main power pack via the ESC's (electronic speed controller) BEC (battery elimination circuit).

It's possible that battery mistake took out the receiver. For some reason you're getting channel mixing. Is this jumper just a M/F extension?

No, I don't have a problem. Why do you ask?

IMAGE(http://mantisonthemountain.com/bits/rcCollection.jpg)

Poop. Broke the nose on my crawler today. Luckily the guy making that chassis is doing a redesign because it's happening to a small percentage of owners. I wasn't doing anything crazy, just practicing on some landscape boulders at the neighborhood park. I guess I hit it just right.

That 'vette is getting to be frustrating as hell. Drifting is hard.

This thread is starting to look like my personal blog. NEED MOHR INPUT.

That's a pretty impressive fleet, LiquidMantis. What kind of crawler is that?

nivek wrote:

TWhat kind of crawler is that?

It's based on an Axial XR10 but I basically only used the axles and (for the short term) wheels. I built it with an Underground Crawlers Viper chassis, modded Traxxas big bore shocks, and Crawler Innovations links. I still have several other upgrades I want to do on it after payday, mainly replacing the steering bits and wheels.

It's RC update time...

I put in an order last night for the parts to fix my TXT-1, which has been sitting busted since the spring. My boy drove it into the tire of my car and snapped off the upper link mount and ripped several ball ends off the suspension links. Tamiya uses a pretty fine thread on the stock ball ends.

I also picked up a nice Stampede roller on eBay that I'm going to merge with the one I already have. There's been a lot of updates to that kit since I bought mine and I wanted to upgrade to the stronger transmission gears, slipper clutch, etc. I'll be stripping all the goodies off the old Stampede and putting them on the new one.

Anybody have any RC news?

nivek wrote:

Anybody have any RC news?

I do! I just got my older son and myself Traxxas Slash 4x4 Platinums so that with my younger son's Blitz we have three short course trucks to go drive. A track opened up really close to the house as well so they should be a blast when we can get over there.

That sounds great! I built my son a Stampede and have been teaching him to drive this summer.

How do you like the slash? Did you get to drive it yet? I see that has a clear body... let's see the paint work!

I've been doing hobby grade rc for a couple years now. I first bought a savage flux for bashing, racing and learning, standing backflips on 4s but 6s was too much power and I couldn't land them, or keep control of it on the track. I switched to 5s and found that to be the sweet spot. Then people around here switched to racing short course so I got a platinum slash 4x4. Then we went indoor for the winter with a corally rdx 10th scale touring, associated r18 18th scale touring, and tamiya M05 for mini racing. I find the mini to be the most fun, not balls to the wall fast like the corally and thus easier to control.

I got a helicopter a couple weeks ago and it's my first attempt at anything but ground based RC but it's been too cold and windy so far to do more than spin the blades. I need to bring it to work and try it out in the auditorium sometime.

nivek wrote:

How do you like the slash? Did you get to drive it yet? I see that has a clear body... let's see the paint work!

Man, we love our Slashes. They're a really good match, at least on 2s, to my other son's Blitz after I put the brushless system in it. It's fun bashing around with them as the Slashes have better acceleration with the 4WD but the Blitz can corner hard by breaking the rear end loose.

I need to snap a picture of it. Unfortunately I didn't really take any when the body was pristine and now it's showing some abuse. Actually, I might have a crappy cellphone photo from when it was first finished.

[Edit] Nope. I had sent my brother a picture through my SMS program but I guess that doesn't save pictures to the gallery.

I've set aside the money to get one of these when they come available
http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/08/p...

IMAGE(http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2012/01/dsc0149-1326054824.jpg)

I have a regular 4 channel heli, but this just seems far too cool.
I drooled at the first AR Drone but passed because I was broke adn $300 seemed like a lot of money.
Now I have the money and AM getting one. NOBODY CAN STOP ME!!!!

[size=3]I hope my wife doesn't find out.[/size]

My wife gave me a Champ RTF G-Flyr for Christmas.

My first attempt at flight was a lesson in how a 14mph wind can affect a very light craft.

http://youtu.be/McuJ4uhzi0g

My wife recorded it for hilarity.

I was lucky. The wind took it over a line of trees into a residential neighborhood. I must've walked a half mile but I found it landed neatly on someone's front lawn.

I now check the wind when I check weather for a flight.

My son got a Tonka Ricochet R/C Replay for Christmas. It's a pretty awesome truck-like vehicle but the battery charge only lasts 15 minutes or so.

Oh and Air Swimmers are pretty cool too.

Not really R/C, but my son and I ventured into the realm of rocketry. Here are some vids of our first attempts at launching an Estes Amazon rocket with both "B" and "C" engines.

http://youtu.be/taz_iYXJw7U

http://youtu.be/C3eW4ob2AVo

http://youtu.be/-u6goZUodYA

We had three good launches before the wind kicked up. We must've hit near a 1000 feet with the "C" engines.

Spoiler:

The wind carried the rocket to a clump of trees where it got hung up and was effectively lost.

I was going to recommend an altimeter, but then I saw your spoiler. Welcome to the hobby!