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Mini-Titan e325 Night Flying LED Setup Progress

JonC — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 03:08:03 +0000

I am working to convert my ACE Mini-Titan e325 to a night-flying setup. Since winter is on the way, the only time I’ll be able to fly is later on in the day when the sun is low, or gone so this is a perfect excuse to play with lighting.

I purchased 2 feet of green and blue LED strip lighting from a vendor at the 2010 NEAT Fair while purchasing a Blade mSR and some extra batteries for it. The LED strips can be cut down to sections consisting of 3 LEDs and require a 12 volt power supply. These strips can also be found that require a 5 volt supply. The 12 volt powered strips work great on radio controlled models which use 3S Lithium Polymer battery packs. Because LEDs are low power draw, even a lot of LEDs won’t make for a huge impact in your flight times if you run them off of your main flight pack. In my setup I use a male JST style connector on the canopy which makes connecting and disconnecting the LEDs for the canopy a simple and quick matter. The female JST connector’s wires run to and tie in with the power lines which run the helicopter tail boom lighting. These are connected to the power connector for the brushless motor speed controller.

The LED strips come with an adhesive 3M tape backing which will pretty much stick to anything. To prep the Mini-Titan canopy I scrubbed it down with 90 percent rubbing alcohol, then i scrubbed it down again and wiped it down, then one more time for good measure. I spent a little bit of time placing strips on different locations of the canopy and finally decided on a layout for the LED strip lights. Once set I cut the strips down to length for each location, removed the paper tape from the adhesive backing and then pressed the strips onto the helicopter canopy.

Once all the strips were down I soldered on all the wiring to connect the LED strips to each other. Soldering LED strips isn’t that hard to do with the right equipment and experience but if you haven’t soldered before I’d recommend practicing your soldering skills a lot before attempting this. There are exposed solder pads at each end of every set of 3 LEDs on the strip which allows you to solder the strips in parallel to each other. I was a bit concerned that soldering the tape while it was stuck to the canopy would melt the canopy at points, but it is a thermoplastic and did not have any problems with the short soldering times required. I used a 45 watt soldering iron to first prime the pads with a blob of solder, and tin the ends of the bridging leads, I then placed the tinned wire atop the hemisphere shaped blob on the soldering pad, heating both till they fused then let the joint cool normally. The last step of the soldering process takes about 2 seconds. You can see the pads in detail in the pictures below, and also how I routed the wires around and took advantage of solder pads being everywhere on the LED strip lighting. Just mind your polarity and you will be good!

That’s all there was too it. It took me about 3 hours last night to do all the work, but that was while watching TV and occasionally plugging the strips in after each addition to make sure everything was still working good and that I had not created any solder shorts which would cause unfortunate problems on the electrical system and batteries for the helicopter.

The results of this work are pretty good and can be seen in the photos below. You’ll also see I have some red and white LED’s in the back. I am planning to replace these with longer strips of alternating colors (red/white or purple/white) perhaps helical wound around the tail boom so I did not detail the installation of these, though it’s pretty much the same; Clean, place and solder. I also have a 1 Watt green Luxeon Star in the front mounted inside of the canopy. The Mini-Titan’s battery tray almost perfectly fits an old square style Luxeon Star board and with the LED right in front of a canopy vent it gets plenty of fresh moving air which means I didn’t have to add any additional heatsinking for the LED.

The setup is very bright, we took some video of it tonight and it over drove the video camera. I didn’t mess around with the video recorders settings too much but I’m sure it could have been adjusted to better tone down the lights. While the lights are extremely bright in person as well, they are also well defined and don’t turn into a ‘glowing glob’. Here’s the short video I made of this setup.

Please let me know what you think of the canopy setup for this helicopter, or share some info on your own setup by commenting below or using the contact form to send me a personal message.

NEAT Fair 2010 Photographs and Videos

JonC — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 02:19:36 +0000

There are quite a few photos that I’ve uploaded and they’re in the gallery below, just open them and use the left/right buttons at the bottom of the viewer pane to move between photos.

There were a lot of great pilots at the NEAT fair and some really fun events as well. The helicopter section was a bit quiet but there Kyle Stacey and someone from Team Just Go Fly were putting on demos throughout the day, and there were some neat R/C Helicopter models flown there from time to time as well.

By far the majority of the aircraft at the NEAT Fair 2010 were airplanes, everything from flat foamies to large highly detail scale models. Everyone looked good flying out there, and while there were some crashes and planes lost in the hills I would have to say most flights were successful and enjoyable to watch.

I didn’t take any models to fly at NEAT, I’m don’t fly well in crowds as they make me nervous, maybe one day I’ll get over that but I’m pretty happy flying my RC aircraft with a few friends and not an audience.

One of the coolest planes to see for me was one pilots hotliner which just ripped up the air. The plane accelerated from a gentle glide to high speeds in no time flat, and actually cavitated in the air when accelerating from a low speed, which sounded pretty cool. I did see some other hotliners, but nothing like that kind of acceleration. It might just be because I’ve not had a lot of exposure to hotliners, but it was a lot of fun and I might have to get into that! Here’s a quick photo and a video.

There were also some neat helicopters, tri-copters, octacopters and all sorts of stuff. The guys from Heli Flight Center were there and seemed to have a lot of people moving through. They were one of the few heli specific booths at the show and they got a lot of interest from passing pilots, lots of questions and over all their booth looked good.

Bryn picked up a Blade MSR for $120 (BNF), he’s never flown a real R/C helicopter before and he tried it out this evening. He got that thing right up and hovering after about 4 attempts, I think he’ll pick it up pretty good in time and might move into more advanced helis. That Blade MSR is a great little RC helicopter.

I picked up some LED lighting strips to add more lighting to my Mini-Titan RC Helicopter. I bought 2 feet of blue LEDs and 2 feet of green LEDs. for $5 per foot. The lighting on the Mini-Titan is great for flying at dusk when there’s not enough light from the sun to make out the position of the helicopter very well. At some point I may even try flying it at night.

The videos will take a little bit of time to process but will be here soon so please bookmark the page and check back for new videos, there are some great shots and views of the demos and events. Some of the events were the NEAT Fair Multiplex EasyStar Combat competition with about 8 Multiplex Easy Stars and one or two collisions and a crash (video further down). Then there was the NEAT Fair Warplane Mass Launch with what looked like 30+ models in the sky at one time.

One flier at the event had a 4 bladed Trex-450, this model was a standard T-Rex but the head had been replaced with this 4 bladed version. Each individual blade grip was pivoted for up and down movement (a flapping head) and the rotor blades were made of an extremely flexible material. At one point the guy bent the blade up almost to 90 degrees while he was showing it off, pretty cool! Here’s some photos and a video.

The pilot with the above heli also had a nice twin-rotor Chinook helicopter (Might be the wrong revision I’m thinking of) It’s based off of some T-Rex mechanics for the heads, and they’re linked internally via a torque tube drive. He described a bit about this helicopter but I only caught a small part of the description on video so I did not upload the description part. It’s pretty weird to watch it fly in some maneuvers, but fun to watch.

Also in the helicopter area was a younger guy flying a Tri-Copter setup for FPV. He was not flying it FPV at the show because AMA requires that you have a co-pilot on a buddy box when flying FPV at an AMA venue. He picked up the information on how to build the model from rcexplorer.se and said that it felt a lot like flying a co-axial helicopter, but performed very well in forward flight.

The basic design of the Tri-Copter is 3 ‘rotors’ which are airplane props, on brushless motors, each with it’s own ESC. One motor is on a pivoting joint to allow it to be tilted left or right by a servo and provide rotational maneuverability. 3 rate gyros are used to stabilize power to the 3 brushless motors, and one heading hold gyro is used to stabilize the rotation of the aircraft via the servo-controlled tail motor angle.

One of the heli guys also had a Parrot AR.Drone, which means ‘augmented reality’ drone. This is a pretty cool new product that runs about $300. It’s controlled by an iPod or iPhone through the Wi-Fi and it sends video back to the iDevice and shows it on the screen. If you have multiple Parrot AR.Drones in flight, you can actually shoot at each other virtually and blow knock each other down. I see one(or two!) of these Parrot AR.Drones in my future just to play with! I posted an article about these earlier in my ‘AR.Drone New Augmented Reality + FPV Combat Product‘ article if you want more details. The one in the picture below looks a bit different because the foam fan shrouds and canopy is off. Yay technology!

There was also a great Multiplex Easy Star combat round where people put their Easy Stars into a fight to the death battle to be the top. There was only one mid-air collision that I saw and recorded and I’ve put the video below. I cut out most of the combat where no contact happens because I know folks like to get right to the combat. The overall battle lasted about 8 1/2 minutes for that round. I’m not sure if there were more rounds, but by then we were pretty well sunburned, sore and tired and decided to call it a night.

Speaking of Mid-Airs, Bryn managed to record a midair crash between two smaller high wing airplanes during a non-combat event, which means they weren’t trying to hit each other. The video is short but pretty good, and as always it’s available in High-Def if you want to watch full screen and burn up some bandwidth.

Another thing that was pretty neat was that I shot a video towards the end of the day when they had a bunch of big electric warbirds in the air. I was trying to shoot the B17 and this little flying wing came into the scene and I was like ‘what!? aww c’mon’ but a few minutes later I found out it was an FPV pilot who had been filming the warbirds from the air and then, of course since it was for the cause of FPV I was then all cool with it. Yesterday the FPV pilot (FPVFLIGHTSCHOOL) subscribed to my YouTube channel and I saw he had posted his FPV view of the B17 so I posted my video of the B17 and his FPV plane from the ground. Both are below. Again the FPV video was shot by YouTube user FPVFLIGHTSCHOOL and the ground video was shot by myself. His video is first, check it out! If you like the videos, make sure to click on the YouTube icon in the video windows and thumb up or leave a comment to the creators.

And my video from the ground (sorry no audio, it’s mostly just me complaining )

I want to say thanks to the folks who let me photograph their aircraft, video their flights and ask a bunch of questions. There were truly many friendly and helpful folks at this event. Also thanks to the folks who setup and run the NEAT Fair, without them this weekend would have been a lot less interesting. They did a great job keeping the place cleaned up and looking good, and they kept a good flow of flying and events throughout the day. I wish I could have stayed up through the night/dusk slow flying events that they had planned, there were quite a few planes to be seen with LED lighting strips on them. Hopefully someone else will post up some good video of that.

I will upload more videos to this post tomorrow, so be sure to check back.

Please enjoy the photo gallery below, and feel free to comment below if you know more about the airplanes or models shown or their pilots. I wasn’t able to get a lot of names as we moved pretty quick and some of the name tags were pretty blurry in the photos.

If you desire more NEAT 2010 Photographs, check out RC Groups – Neat Fair 2010 at http://www.rcgroups.com/neat-fair-2010-698/

Analyzing Your Radio Controlled Helicopters Current Consumption

JonC — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 01:36:39 +0000

I’ve been flying quite a bit and not paying much attention to the load I’ve been putting on my speed controller. Today I plugged my CC50 ICE into the computer to check out my last few flights. I was quite surprised. Most of my flying did not load the ESC as much as I had expected. While I had a few high spikes on current and wattage, overall my flights were pretty average. I’ve mostly been practicing flips and inverted hovering, and most things I attempt do not qualify as hardcore 3D. I’m slowly getting there though.

My inverted hovering skills have been honed over a few flights. The majority of it was done during one evening where I attempted it for the first time and then flew 3 more battery packs over the evening. You can see this in the video of my first inverted hover attempts below.

So I’ve been working on those but I’ve also just been screwing around. The log chart below is based on a flight where I was flying fast forward and then did a hard breaking maneuver by the following: Fast forward flight, rotate the heli 90 degrees(nose to the sky) and then applying high collective. This spiked the power readings on the ice as you can see, pulling out a large amount of current. Just click on it to see a full size version.

When I did that I pulled the current up to around 50 amps on the ESC, which is within it’s >peak< rating by quite a bit. I have another flight on which I screwed up and I did a recovery, highly loading the rotor disc and you can see that chart below. Again, just click it for a larger version

You can see in the above graph that I pulled nearly 60.3 amps,, again well within the limits.

Basically by analyzing the information from my speed controller I have a better idea of how my flying is affecting my system, and as well I know I’m well within the systems limits. Chance of an electrical failure due to my flying abilities is pretty low! Carry on!

Trying Out Some Low Cost Outrunner Brushless Motors from eBay

JonC — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 22:52:34 +0000

These outrunner brushless motors were shipped straight from China and took about two weeks to arrive and cost about $12 each shipped. Here are a couple of high resolution photos of these motors, they have a nice flat gold color to the ends and the bell is chromed a good overall appearance at first look.

The motors were recommended to me by a fellow Radio Controlled FPV flyer for use with the Skyfun jet-like foam glider from HobbyKing. I bought two of the gliders and had tried a couple of different motor combination with not too much luck. When I saw his video of his Skyfun with this motor, I sent him a message and found out what he was using.

These motors are relatively cheap so I had assumed that the quality would be questionable. I wanted to see if this was a viable option to use for a cheaper radio controlled airplane and for various small projects that I didn’t want to risk more expensive motors or where it simply doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of money for a motor.

The machining quality overall does look pretty decent on the motors themselves, but unfortunately the prop adapters are a bit mangled. The one on the left has the cross cuts way off center and the one on the right has the hole off center it appears.

I also checked the motors against the specifications.

Specifications for BC2826-6 Outrunner Brushless Motor from rctimer.com
Model: BC2826-6
Motor size: ?28*26mm (I measured 28 * 28. This was measured from the base of the motor to the exposed part of the shaft)
Shaft size: ?3.175*37mm (3.17mm x 42mm)
Weight: 50g (50g with no accessories, near 60g with back plate and prop adapter, this scale only shows 10g steps)
KV(rpm/v): 2200 (untested)
Max Power: 342W (untested)
Battery: 2-3Li-Po
Test Prop: 7×3/7×4 (untested)
Ri(M ?): 0.033 (tested under 0.1 ohm)
ESC(A): 30A (untested)

I thought it was pretty odd that both the motor can length and the shaft length are longer than specified by the manufacturer and markings on the can. I tried to measure the can a couple of different ways but nothing came up to 26mm. In the end I measure from the base of the motor to the top of the motor where the shaft exits.

Once I get some leads attached to one of these brushless motors I’ll test it with and without a prop, disassemble it to check out the magnet mounting and winding quality and dump some CC-ICE graphs in this article as well to see how it matches up to the specs.

AR.Drone New Augmented Reality + FPV Combat Product

JonC — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 07:07:48 +0000

Have you seen the Parrot AR.Drone? The Parrot is an Augmented Reality + FPV combat product that is controlled via Wi-Fi from your iPod, iPad or iPhone touch. But they say they are working on support for other platforms, hopefully Android is in the list, and I bet it is. It’s bound to satisfy some or all of your air combat and dog fighting needs. The Parrot AR.Drone is a cool looking product with a heck of a lot going for it, and some improvements required, but in general I think it will be a blast. The biggest complaint I hear is that the frame rate is pretty low, around 15 frames per second. When you consider the processing and other things involved this is not too surprising, but could seem a bit choppy. I think for being

The AR.Drone’s have markings on them which let the camera on your iPhone, iPod or iPad identify what you are aiming at, via networking you and your opponent(s) dogfight against each other to shoot each other down through the augmented reality interface. The leaning and tilting of the phone control these hovering aircraft, which are quite similar to the quadrapod type designs seen in other FPV and autonomous model aircraft designs.

Do yourself a favor and watch the video, then think of what you might be able to do with a model such as this. Rumor has it that the selling price will be around 350USD but it looks like fun and may be worth it to have a cool little piece of tech. Maybe get a few people at the office involved and buying some Parrot AR.Drones and have lunchtime massive FPV dogfights! I think I’ll be getting one once they come out with an Android compatible version. Multi-platform support will be awesome, even your like/dislike for another persons mobile platform won’t keep you from dogfight, and heck might even be the cause of some! Which is the better dogfight controller? The Android or the iDevice(?)

What do you folks think!? Do you own one, do you want one, do you not want one? Let me know in the comment section below I’d love to hear more from everyone.

Some Labor Day RC Flying

JonC — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 03:48:33 +0000

Some friends and I flew some RC aircraft to celebrate Labor Day. We had been out on Sunday and got some flying in too at our ‘south’ field with a few other friends, and this video is from up ‘north’ at our other field. On Monday my buddy Ollie and my buddy Bryn who we’re trying to get into R/C flying went out to the field. They’re both great folks to hang out with, Bryn’s videography is getting better each time and Ollie is constantly pushing me to improve my abilities and try new things which is really important if you want to expand you abilities.

You can see the Labor Day RC Heli Video by clicking the link to the left (or embedded below!) More below the.. fold(?)

My helicopter is the Ace RC Mini-Titan 450 with the white canopy and LED lighting on it. It’s got a Scorpion 2221-8 brushless motor on a stock Mini-Titan frame. (The only upgrades are the motor/ESC, metal head block, mixing arms and the carbon fiber blades). I’m running an Airtronics SD-10G radio with the 8 channel Rx, LT2100 gyro, Castle Creations 50ICE and HG-65mg servos for cyclic/pitch on the head and a Futaba 9257 for the tail. Most of my packs are Turnigy 2200′s. I have 1 Outrage battery pack left, and it still outputs a lot of power but is puffed like crazy and doesn’t balance well.

Ollies heli is a T-Rex 450 with carbon fiber side frames, an aluminum upper with a custom OT Model Fab upper bearing support for the motor. He’s running a flybarless setup with the Skookum SK-720 flybarless module which is pretty awesome. He’s running a Scorpion 2221-6 with a Hyperion ESC. He’s reported the tail kicking out a few times, but I’m sure he’ll get it sorted it and overall the response is awesome. He’s running a JR 8103 with a Spektrum 2.4Ghz module on it as well, and some INOtech metal gear servos for the cyclic/pitch. His machine is a freaking monster for a 450 and it’s gotta be seen to be believed.

Both helis are running the same carbon fiber rotor blades which are less than $20 a pair. Ollie is running around 3200 RPM on the rotor and I’m running about 2500 on the rotor according to our heli-nut friends from HeliFlightCenter who are local and a couple of good guys.

The plane you see occasionally is Ollie’s ‘Tiny’ and older model which he flies with great skill and seems to enjoy quite a bit pushing it to it’s limits. I don’t know the exact specs but it runs a tiny brushless motor (pinky sized thickness) on a geared prop, it gets long flights and looks great!

First Inverted Hover Attempts on My Mini-Titan Heli

JonC — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 22:58:27 +0000

Yesterday I began the process of learning to hover my RC helicopter inverted and made a video of the good parts of the 4 flights. I’ve been getting a lot more flying in lately with my Ace R/C Mini-Titan.

About a month ago I was flying a bit late and lost orientation of the heli and put it in. You’ll probably see lights on the heli here and there in the video, but I’ll make another post on those. The lights do help a lot when the sun goes down and it’s hard to get perspective.

The video below shows my progress with inverted hovering over four flights. I have practiced this only for about 10 minutes on my Phoenix R/C flight simulator, but the sim just never feels right compared to the real thing, so I just decided to practice with the real thing. The first and second flights are pretty rough but you can see a slow improvement over the duration of the video clip. My goal is to be able to hover a complete flight (4:30 minutes) inverted.

My accumulated RC heli experience before attempting this is quite a few years of semi-sedate stuff. I’m competent with hovering, fast forward flight. I’m comfortable flipping the heli forwards and backwards, as well as side to side. I’ve rolled the heli while pulling up into a vertical climb (kind of like a stall climb with a plane) and while not totally comfortable with it I can hover nose in alright.

Last week I spent about an hour practicing inverted blow-outs where I flipped the heli and hammered negative collective to push the heli up into the air to try and get a feel for the collective when inverted and the responsiveness, as well as trying to remember the right way to punch the collective when inverted.

Overall I would say in less than 20 minutes of flying (4:30 minutes x 4 flights) I’ve made quite an improvement on inverted hovering. There is plenty of room for improvement of course, but I think at this rate it will come quickly. The biggest part of learning new skills when flying models, and in fact doing most things is to find the time to put into actually flying or doing those things.

Once I get good at hovering inverted nose in, then I will spend some time working on hover inverted nose out as well. Hopefully in a couple of months I’ll feel comfortable in all positions of upright and inverted.

The video is uploading right now, and I’m about to go test out my new FPV Glider. I’ve set this post to auto-post at about the time the video is complete.

Update: The video is here or embedded below

Feel free to share below if you’ve recently been trying out some new moves with your RC heli or airplane.

Heli-Max Novus CP R/C Helicopter

JonC — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 19:13:18 +0000

This is just a quick post about the Heli-Max Novus CP R/C Helicopter I picked up the other day. It’s a pretty great tiny helicopter so I wanted to share it with you folks.

I hope every had a great Christmas and New Years this year and kept plenty warm. Things were good here and I did a little after the holidays shopping as well. I picked up the Novus CP from my local hobby shop in Kingston and was admittedly an ‘impulse’ buy.

The kit is sold as Ready-to-Fly’ (RTF) and almost everything you need to fly is included. It comes with a 6 channel 2.4Ghz programmable transmitter, spare parts. The only extra thing you need to get flying is a set of 8 AA batteries for the transmitter. It’s a full collective-pitch helicopter with an idle-up switch on the transmitter.

The battery for the helicopter is included, it’s a single cell Li-Poly 400mAh battery which uses an ‘HMX’ style connector. I’ve not seen this type of connector before but it may be more common with little electric aircraft. The battery seems to take between 20-30 minutes to charge completely and you should charge it right out of the box.

The Novus CP is tiny, if you look at it compared to my Mini-Titan 450, you can probably grasp how small it really is. The Mini-Titan in itself is a smaller electric helicopter compared to nitro-methane powered or gasoline powered helicopters that I used to fly.

The setup is pretty clean. There’s a small brushed motor powering the main rotor, the head is controlled by three nano-sized servos in an eCCPM configuration, there are no complex linkages in this little guy.

The tail rotor uses an even smaller motor. There’s no pitch control on the tail rotor as the motor just changes direction back and forth instead.

The receiver, motor speed control and gyro are built together into one module which sits at the front of the helicopter. When you power up the heli, it centers the gyro so you should do that on a flat surface to ensure the tail rotor operates properly.

There are additional ports for tail rotor output and main motor ESC output if you decide to upgrade it to a brushless system later. Heli-Max does sell a lot of upgrades for this such as brushless motors, and CNC machined head components if you like hop-ups or bling.

The helicopter flies pretty good in it’s stock configuration, you should tighten the blades a little bit or it will ‘orbit’ while you’re hovering and other things. Once you get it a couple of feet off the ground the flight stabilizes as you’re not flying through the rotor wash.

This helicopter is a bit more work to keep in the air than larger size helicopters but it’s not extremely twitchy like some other micro-sized helis I have flown. I would not recommend it as a first helicopter, it seems the smaller these things get, the more work they are to keep in the air.

The radio is also programmable as well, although it requires you to remove a cover, flip a switch and then use the two knobs on it’s face to set new values. Once you have set the new values, you turn the switch back. This allows you to adjust the throttle and pitch curves, the hover throttle, exponential(affects all controls) and other things you would expect to find in a helicopter radio. I was somewhat surprised by all the features. Additionally since this is a full CP (Collective-Pitch) helicopter the radio also has an Idle-Up switch which will allow you to do a lot of the inverted tricks and some level of 3D flying as well.

I don’t have a large enough indoor space at home to try any stunts or 3D type maneuvers with, but I will try it in the warehouse at work next week.

For the price this is a very good deal, considering it comes with programmable radio as well. It also includes a spare set of rotor blades and a spare one-piece tail rotor in the box. The manual is fairly straight forward about repairing the helicopter and changing the settings as well. There is a manual update on the Heli-Max site, which is in references to tightening the blades before flying.

However fun this is it is considered an older generation of model product, so you should not pay a premium price for it.

There are newer versions of this heli out under the Walkera name, the original manufacturer, that can be had for a fair price with newer features, such as the dual brushless motors and other things included for pretty great prices. If you can get this kit as a reasonable discount I would recommend it.

R/C Flying on a Cold Sunday in December

JonC — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:46:56 +0000

I was sitting at my computer yesterday after Saturday’s snowfall, enjoying a nice day in the warm indoors when my buddy Ollie called to see if I wanted to go flying. I started off with ‘I’ve been flying every weekend and thought I might take one off since it’s so cold outside’. The conversation ended with me saying ‘Okay, see you at the field in an hour’.

I’m glad I went, we got a couple of flights in each in about an hour and a half’s time. The field was deserted as is to be expected in the cold weather. There are very few ‘hardcore’ all weather fliers out there. In past years I’ve flown in the middle of snow-storms with my friends. We took turn shooting video of each other flying. Ollie took his Cypher 3D 450 sized helicopter and I took my GP Reactor Bipe EP and my Mini-Titan 450 sized helicopter.

Ollie had these blue rubber gloves that he said helped keep your hands a bit warmer, while still allowing you to fly. It was around 28F out, so I decided to give them a try. They do work somewhat better than bare skin, so if you see ‘smurf hands’ in the videos, that’s the deal there.

The Mini-Titan needs some more work, so I just packed it up rather than risking fate, but flew the GP Reactor Bipe a couple of times.

For people who can’t use the built in player you can see the videos of me Here and Ollie Here and for the rest you can view the videos below.

Then we froze and went home, the end!

Upgraded Mini-Titan RC Helicopter and Eagle Tree Flight Data Recorder Results

JonC — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:32:33 +0000

I recorded the pack current and volts on my ACE Mini-Titan R/C Helicopter using an Eagle Tree flight data recorder V3 with my new setup. I had some awesome flights with flips and rolls and high G-force turns mixed in while flying with Ollie on Saturday.

The new setup uses metal mixing arms, green paddles, a Scorpion HK-2221-8 brushless motor, Castle Creations Phoenix-45 and a 13 tooth pinion. The current draw looks pretty reasonable, on the high power climb outs you can see a large spike up to as high as 44 amps.

This helicopter climbs like crazy with this setup, very very fast! The current is about 10 amps below the peak of the batteries capabilities though so I’m glad it stopped there. Going too much further would probably result in LiPo (Lithium-Polymer) puffing! The batteries are rated at 25C discharge and the pack is 2200mAh or 2.2 Amp hours. with the 25C rating this is 25 * 2.2 which turns out to be 55 amps.

Anyways, check out the results from the flight data recorder in the gallery below. The voltage is the green line and the numbers on the right, and the current is the purple line and the numbers on the left(in amps).

As always, if you have any questions please use the contact links on this website, they’re fairly visible. As for the photos click on the photo and use the left/right arrows on the bottom right of the image to navigate through the slides. AND as always, thank you for your support, it makes this site possible!

Finally Decent Flips and Rolls on the Mini-Titan

JonC — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:26:49 +0000

I went out with my flying buddy and friend Ollie tonight to a real open field and was able to fly the Mini-Titan with all the upgrades. The Scorpion -8 motor, the new speed controller, the metal / aluminum control arms, and the green paddles.

The first flight was just getting used to things for the most part, the heli really sings and sounds smooth with this motor and gearing setup. It’s quite a bit more touchy with the green paddles, and will take some getting used to.

On the second flight I went for flips and rolls and was simply amazed at the difference in the performance of the helicopter, the flips and rolls were great, relatively. The last time I tried to flip this heli, it was more like a loop that ended up in a bush. I was pretty comfortable flipping my Raptor 50, and my Raptor 60 (70) so I doubt it was pilot error. I held off at first because I was afraid it would be a similar experience, but it was not anything like that, it was AWESOME.

I tend not to use exponential or dual rates when flying, I’ve personally found it an added confusion to have it flying in multiple different ways. Someone once said that mankind’s biggest downfalls is the failure to understand exponentials. While I understand exponentials reasonably well in many things, I don’t adjust for them well.

Setting exponential in an RC radio is a way to make the sticks less responsive in the center, and more responsive the further away you get for center. For the most part this allows you to have your controls less re-active in the middle, making it easier to control the plane or helicopter with small adjustments in the middle. The response is non-linear, which means the further you push the stick out in any direction(which has exponential enabled) the more responsive the control gets. 1/4″ of stick travel around the middle may only move the servo arm 1 or 2mm, but if you move it past 1/4″ the servo arm starts to EXPONENTIALLY respond, and an additional 1/4″ may move the servo arm 4-6mm, etc.

While I feel ‘expo’ is beneficial for most, in my non-linear mind it just screws me up, so I leave it out.

Dual rates serves a similar purpose. When you have the DR switch on a ‘low’ setting, servo travel is limited across the entire movement of the control stick in a linear way. When you are in high dual rate settings, the controls will move the servo more, across the entire stick range, resulting in more responsive controls for stunts or other thing.

Even ‘old’ radios have pretty high resolution for the stick movement that if you do not enable dual rates or exponential, you can train your brain to move the sticks slightly for fine control, and more extensively for those high-g adrenaline pumping maneuvers.

It all comes down to a personal preference. I dislike non-linearity in my controls and I also do not like it when my heli responds differently depending on the position of a switch I may or may not forget to throw before a stunt move. Currently the only switch I use is the idle up switch, and I’m sure someone will come up with a way to get rid of that eventually. One of my great crashes (check The Carnage section) was due to forgetting to switch into idle-up.

If you’re interested more in my upgrades, check the related posts down below.

Some Thoughts On Recording Aerial Video with a Small RC Helicopter

JonC — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 20:34:34 +0000

Before I put the Sony DSC-H10 on the mini-titan I didn’t even bother to look up it’s weight but I knew it was hefty. I was just searching for some lighter cameras today and looked up the DSC-H10. It turns out the Sony weighs in at 13.4 ounces w/battery. That’s about 0.75 pounds. Thinking about it, the Mini-Titan did pretty good with all that weight. The helicopter, fully equipped weighs in at about 26.25 ounces, or about 1.64 pounds. (with a couple additional items, it’s fair to say this helicopter weighs 1.75 pounds without a camera.

The good part is I was only about 3/4 way up the collective/throttle stick so it definitely had the power to lift this, though at a high current demand which is not good for batteries and other things. I have been shopping around (window shopping mostly) for a smaller camera to mount to the heli so that I could record some more ‘natural’ flights than just hovering around.

While looking at cameras I found the Canon Powershot SD780 IS. This camera is a 10MP still camera which offer tons of features, additionally it will shoot 30fps video at a 1280×720 resolution. Additionally this camera weighs in much lighter at 5.6oz including batteries(.35 pounds) it’s quite a bit lighter than the Sony Powershot DSC-H10, by almost 1/2 pound.

Additionally I could strip weight from the helicopter with a few changes. I could remove the flight data recorder which weighs about 0.7 ounces (not a big gain). I could switch over to my ultralight(very light) Berg 7 channel receiver and use that instead of the 9 channel PCM receiver I use now. The current PCM receiver weighs about 1 oz, the ultra-light Berg receiver comes in at 0.33 ounces which would be another .66 in weight loss, so with those two items I could loose about one ounce off the heli, bringing the overall weight of the setup to around 31-32 ounces. Right in at 2 pounds not accounting for a custom vibration isolating mount.

By switching the current wood blades out for much more efficient carbon fiber blades and doing the same with the tail rotor blades I don’t think that moving a camera the weight of the SD780 IS would pose much of a problem. There’s also the possibility of re-gearing the brushless motor by one or two teeth on the motor pinion to lower the headspeed and experiment more with loaded flight over 3D flight.

I do know there are a lot of ‘mini’ type spycams and stuff like that out there, but I really detest low quality pictures and video those produce, and they’re really not much cheaper than a high quality point and shoot. If I’m going to go through the trouble of setting something like this up, I’m going to try and get the best I can, within a reasonable budget, to shoot some fun or information stuff.

I always seem to do this with projects, what should be fun ‘day off’ kind of stuff, go fly the heli etc, turns into a big project and then every day out for fun turns into a project to shoot interesting video, or do something interesting, etc. I still find it fun. But it’s like building a new PC fun vs doing jumps on a motorcycle fun. I may just have to pick up a second Mini-Titan at some point so one can be Wheee fun! and the other can be Tech Fun!.

The only unfortunate thing about shooting video from a helicopter this small is that they are not as stable as their bigger cousins. When a friend and I shot video using our heli’s with 6 foot rotor spans (as seen on my heli page) they produced some pretty stable output. Although it took quite some time to get everything set up right. But I guess I can accept that loss of stability as long as I can isolate the vibration in the helicopter and in the camera mount, I think the quality will still turn out pretty nice!

As usual, the big problem will be comming up with the funds to do this. I just blew $60 on a new transmitter RF module for my Futaba 9CHP transmitter, the module died on my attempt to fly a second time yesterday. Fortunately it died while I was on the ground. It has very odd problems though. If you take the housing off the module, the transmitter module still does not work unless you blow into it. I suspect an output transistor failed, and airflow lowers the temp back down low enough for it to begin working again.

How I Made an Affordable and Fun Aerial Helicam with My Mini-Titan

JonC — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 20:24:25 +0000

I was sitting here at home today, upset (hehe) that another thunderstorm thwarted our lawn mowing efforts. It wasn’t quite dry enough to mow, but there really wasn’t much else going on. As an aside I was also trying to find a way to bury the guilt of turning off my work cell phone for this first weekend.. since ever.

Then it struck me, I could mount a camera to the Mini-Titan and play around a little bit. I’ve done this with my bigger helis when I had them and it usually turned out pretty well. You can probably find some videos on my rocket site that were taken from R/C helicopters. Back when those were shot though, a friend and I used a Bergen Intrepid gasser heli that was powered by a high end gasoline motor. Similar to what you might find in a good quality weed eater, but with some modifications. That heli also had a professional pan/tilt camera mount, etc.

So, I’m sitting at home, I have an R/C Helicopter, the Ace Mini-Titan that I’ve recently modded with a scorpion 2221-8 and Castle Creations Phoenix 45 speed controller and added a couple of shiny metal bits to. Then I have my trusty Sony DSC-H10 8 megapixel still camera which can shoot reasonable lower quality video. But how do I mount a camera to my helicopter? I ran over to the dining room, which, truth be told, is our in-house tool and ‘project stuff room’ and started rummaging around for things to make a camera mount of. I settle on a U shaped drive bay plug from an old computer case as the base of the helicam mount.

I then drilled the flanges of the drive bay plug so they’d slide over the helicopter’s landing skids and drilled a hole for a screw that would connect to the camera’s mounting point. I mounted the bracket and with the careful application of top secret elastic and plastic compounds I firmly attached the bracket to the rest of the heli. I then mounted the camera. Here is what I ended up with.

Note: It is difficult to take a picture of your camera with your camera I discovered. Unfortunately I did have to turn the work cell phone back on to take this picture, but I got it over with and it’s now off and away.

Because I needed more than one photo to make a ‘gallery’ and I am still figuring out photo sharing I decided to share with you my coveted picture of a turtle I took at the pond back behind work on the 25th. I was actually trying to get a picture of the red fox who lives back there, but no luck. Enjoy the slime covered turtle! I love how they lift their heads way up when they’re looking around.

Click here to watch the Mini-Titan Heli-Cam Video

You can see it’s not the most fancy modification but it did work for the basic idea of a helicam. Some things worth noting are that the Sony DSC-H10 is a pretty heavy camera for it’s size, I was surprised that the heli was able to lift it without too much effort. The camera is also mounted to the right side of the helicopter which puts it slightly off balance, with just 3 clicks of left trim it was hovering solid with the camera attached.

In the video you can see there is quite a bit of vibration. This is due mostly to the fact that the camera mount was directly connected to the heli skid. To do it right you need very good dampers at all physical mounting points to isolate high and low frequency vibrations. While it’s not the greatest video it’s kind of fun to watch and a good result for a little amount of work.

As a side effect my LiPoly battery was quite hot but the Scorpion HK-2221-8 motor and Castle Creations Phoenix-45 speed controller both stayed on the ‘warm’ side. The LiPoly pack did puff up a bit, but since it’s cooled it’s flat as a pancake again.

The pack is 2.2Ah, rated at 25C so I should be able to pull around 55 amps from it! I was a bit concerned that the flight with the camera may have drawn too much current, if only there were some way to know… Oh right, there would have been, but unfortunately my Eagle Tree eLogger v3 flight data recorder’s log memory was full so I didn’t get any of that information. I am going to post some comparisons of my stock motor/setup vs the new motor/setup so if you wanted to see data, check that post instead.

I really want to get one of those tiny video cameras that weigh next to nothing and would be much easier mount and setup. They’re not expensive so I might pick on up in a couple of months ones I get some cashola in the bank again. So if you have a small digital camera that shoots video, maybe you can just make some fun and setup your own simple aerial heli-cam.

Some Site Updates, Scott’s PatchMaster, Lasers, and Helicopters

JonC — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:08:42 +0000

It’s raining tonight again. It’s really been crazy, like it should be Spring right now and not summer. For the last two weeks we’ve had almost non-stop rain, perhaps one or two days without it. The Scott’s Patchmaster is doing great, but it’s not really getting a chance to get it’s roots deep in the ground and form a solid mat due to all of the available water from rain, as a result the ground is a bit squishy over there still. I keep a jar out on one of the planters so I can see how much it rains. In one 24 hour period I measured almost 3 inches of rain! Crazy weather!

There’s a few changes coming to the Thaltech.com website, it won’t affect this blog for the most part, but is part of me wanting to unify all of my various hobbies into something easily manageable and search-able.

I’ve started updating some of the other pages on this website. My most visited site, my current Jon’s Homebuilt Lasers , is slowly being transitioned over to Jon’s Commercial, Industrial and Homebuilt Lasers which will me in the format of a new CMS / Blogging style which closely mirrors the appearance of this site. I plan on getting some things going with that hobby in a month or two and wanted a site which was easy to update, as well as I am interested in merging appearance and access on my websites.

Also in transition at this time is my current Jon’s Helis website. I also be converting my rocket site over as well as creating a new one specifically for my high voltage projects and experiments.

When all is said and done I will replace the main Thaltech Webpage with a blog type interface as well which will receive general ‘stuff’ type posts and also receive updates from each of the partitioned sites. This will allow me to have all of my projects and work and hobbies and such indexed on the main URL for my website, providing for my own little gateway into things.

You may ask why I’d want to make everything completely separate, rather than just running one giant blog. For one I want to individually theme each site towards people who have interest in those specific items, without them having to dig through a ton of unrelated content. Additionally I like to keep things segmented for my own purposes.

Mini-Titan Helicopter e325 Upgrades with Phoenix 45 and Scorpion HK-2221-8

JonC — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:27:56 +0000

I completed the upgrades to my Mini-Titan e325 radio controlled helicopter this week, they came in on Wednesday and I had them done and/or installed by Thursday. The parts I ordered can be seen in this previous post

The HK-2221-8 from Scorpion Motors was easy to install, it comes with some proprietary pin-type connector for the motor. You can either desolder these and put your own on or use the included female connectors that are often included with electronic speed controllers. These connectors seem to be decent quality. The female connectors have a spring around the fingers to pull them tight onto the male pins, keeping everything secure. They solder on just like your standard ‘bullet’ type connectors.

I mounted the pinion onto the motors output shaft using blue Loctite paste. The Loctite paste comes in a tube, sort of like school glue, and it is a lot cleaner to deal with. You should make sure to push it into the threads of the screw or nut as it’s not a free flowing liquid and isn’t of too much use if it just sits on the surface. I know that a lot of people are fond of the red Loctite for this task, but I really hate having to heat the motor shaft to pull a pinion, and the blue has worked out well for me. I lined the pinion up relative to the old pinion’s position on the stock motor shaft and then cranked the grub screw down nice and tight.

The small size of the electronic speed controller from Castle Creations was a bit of a surprise for me. I had forgotten how efficient they are with the size of their products. The stock 40 Amp ESC that came with the Mini-Titan is at least twice the size of the new CC Phoenix 45 Amp speed control. Prep was pretty much the same as any brushless motor speed control. Trim the wires to fit your setup. (Hint: Estimate the length you need, then add 1/2 to 1 inch to allow for bends, etc) solder on the deans and female pin connectors and we’re off!

I had ordered the metal washout block, fly bar control arms, and the metal mixing levers to install. Unfortunately I was not able into install the mixing levers because the stock ACE plastic flybar cage interferes with the metal levers (or the other way around). This means I would need to order a new metal fly bar cage but I’m going to hold off on that for now. I want to leave some plastic components in the head as ‘break points’ so the expensive metal bits have less chance of being destroyed in a crash.

The washout and the fly bar control arms were very easy to install. I already had a metal headblock installed. I disconnected all the links and removed the head block from the main shaft, then I installed the washout block/control arm assembly down onto the shaft and reinstalled the headblock securely. Pretty easy!

Bryn was kind enough to take some pictures for me of my slightly upgraded Minit-Titan e325 you can see some additional ones below

I’ve Ordered Some Upgrade Parts for the Mini-Titan e325 Helicopter

JonC — Tue, 26 May 2009 02:08:03 +0000

I’m patiently awaiting for the arrival of some new parts for my Mini-Titan. I wasn’t very happy with the plastic control arms on the rotor head that came with the kit, they tend to flex under load. I’m already running an ACE metal CNC head block on the helicopter, so I’m doing a partial upgrade on it. I also ordered a metal CNC washout base as well.

I also ordered a new motor and speed controller. The primary reason for ordering the motor was that I think one of my bearings on the stock ACE red motor is going out and I figured I might as well get something decent. I ordered a new speed controller because I don’t like the setup on the stock one too much. The stock controller and motor will get used in a less critical application, I’m not sure where, yet, but I have some ideas.

The Scorpion motors come well recommended and well reviewed. With the HK-2221-8 being what most people use in a Mini-Titan if they go with a Scorpion, and the HK-2221-6 providing extreme performance with the cost of possible excessive parts wear. Even on ‘high end’ helis it can cause excessive wear.

And to finish of my binge purchase of heli stuff I bought a set of green paddles. In reality I’ve seen people fly the heck out of a stock Mini-Titan, far greater than my abilities allow, so I doubt I’ll ever have to upgrade beyond this for quite a while.

I bought all of the parts through HeliProz, due to past good experiences. You may be able to save a few bucks shopping elsewhere, there are many dealers for these kind of helicopters, parts, supplies and other things out there. Don’t forget to consider shipping costs when buying parts. Buying through 5 different companies to save on parts may end up costing you more in the end once you calculate in the shipping costs.

Shopping List:
(links open in new windows / tabs)

Motor: Scorpion HK-2221-8
Speed Controller: Castle Creations Phoenix-45
Pinion Gears: Ace PV0729 13-Tooth
Metal Flybar Control Levers: Ace PV0807
Metal Mixing Levers: Ace PV0805
Metal Washout Base: Ace PV0808
Paddles: Ace PV0837

Memorial Day Weekend and Another Weekend Update

JonC — Sun, 24 May 2009 18:06:21 +0000

I hope everyone in the US is having or had a good Memorial Day weekend. So far I’ve been doing yard work and flying, and tomorrow will probably be grilling as well.

I’ve been a bit slow this week in uploading photos and updates on the new patch I put on the lawn on Monday, 7 days ago. The PatchMaster hasn’t sprouted up grass yet, but it should go in the next few days if all goes well and things should start to turn green. I bought the 15 pound bag for around $25 to patch this area and some others.

There’s some thunderstorms moving in as I type so the lawns have been getting plenty of water. There’s also a pick of the backyard lawn which we leveled and then planted seed with the use of a wood fiber germinating mat. The areas that grew in seem to be doing well, but unfortunately there seem to be good size patches which just never sprouted, and I’m not sure why. I mowed over that mat once, most of it stayed in place. I suspect we’ll have to put more seed down once the summer is over.

The big lawn project however, on the peninsula is doing well as you can see in that photo (with the 4 sprinklers, next to the barn). I trimmed back our Eastern Red Cedar on the peninsula (which is actually a juniper – Juniperus virginiana) so now it is not hanging on the ground. You can see the before picture, with the moss ‘lawn area’ in the forground, and the after picture with the now grassy lawn in the foreground. It looks a lot better being opened up like that and will make mowing a bit easier. I also want to cut back some branches from the acorn tree which are hanging over the front of the barn.

I also added a couple photo’s of a plant that I’m not familiar with. (Update: They appear to be Peonies) It has these big red buds at the top of the stem which have not opened up yet, I guess it’s still doing something in there before it bursts forth. There are a lot of tiny ants all over these buds that seem to be paying a lot of attention to them though. Either they’re waiting for what’s inside, or there’s some sort of plant juices they like there.

Another Lazy Sunday

JonC — Sun, 17 May 2009 21:25:39 +0000

Well, we’ve all heard the saying that ‘Idle hands are the Devil’s work’ but this doesn’t qualify as the Devil’s work, but maybe not very productive. I went out with my friend Ollie today and got some flying in at a local small field. It’s been a long time since I’ve actually flown at a field, for the last year the most flying I’ve done is mostly just hovering and buzzing around a little in the yard. Back when I had the nitro and gasoline heli’s I would be at the field every weekend flying and was a much better pilot. Things are slowly coming back, I’m getting more comfortable flying this small (feels tiny) electric, and plan to do a lot more flying this summer.

The photo gallery is of myself ( blue shirt, mostly white Mini-Titan e325 ) and my buddy Ollie (dark shirt, white/black/red Cypher 3D with custom frames and small plane ) flying at the field this afternoon. Once we got back we decided to to burn some more time with an old LiPo pack. Unfortunately the pack had been sitting around too long and we couldn’t even get it to deflagrate violently. So the next best thing was to fire off an Estes E9 model rocket engine in one of the planters. We buried the engine and let it rip, here’s the video

Estes E9 Engine WMV Format

Estes E9 Engine Quicktime MOV Format

Here are the photo’s, please enjoy. If you’re not familiar with the image viewer on this site, click on a picture below, it will open in the viewer. Use the Left and Right arrows on the bottom right side of the image to move between images.

Mini-Titan e325 Electric R/C Helicopter

JonC — Tue, 05 May 2009 01:18:58 +0000

I wanted to post some more pics of the Mini-Titan e324 helicopter for anyone who might be interested. The kit is an Ace R/C Mini-Titan e325 and is the non-SE version. The Mini-Titan SE comes with all the aluminum blingbling you could be interested in. The 325 is relevant to the length of the blade, but is a 450 size electric helicopter if you go by other peoples standards such as the T-Rex and so on.

You can click here to see more pics of electric, nitro and gasoline powered R/C helicopters I own or have owned (new window) from my helicopter site.

The picture below is of a nitro-methanol powered helicopter I owned, provided as a comparison for the smaller electric one which is the subject of this post, and pictured in the gallery images below it.

A .50 Powered Nitro-Methanol Raptor 50

The smaller electrics like the Mini-Titan and T-Rex 450 are great for a quick quiet flight in a small area where you wouldn’t want to fire up a nitro-methanol or gasoline combustion engine powered model helicopter. Though they tend to have quite a few benefits, they are not really neighbor friendly, and it’s not really safe to fly them in tight quarters. If you are in an environment that allows nitro-methanol, I’d certainly look deeper into the advantages and disadvantages of both types.

My Mini-Titan e325 runs the stock ACE brushless motor and ACE brushless electronic speed controller included with the kit. The blades, as seen in the photo, are Align 325 Pros. They are wooden blades, but perform decently. The stock kit blades are very heavy and not that great, though you can do your initial setup with them if needed. I’ve recently dumped the Align pro’s and switch to a generic carbon fiber 325mm blade type that I get from heliflightcenter.com for $17 a pair (and I get helireward points!)

My ACE Mini-Titan e325 Setup as of This Posting:

Radio: Futaba 9CHP 9-channel computer radio
Receiver: Futaba 149DP 9-channel PCM receiver
Servos: 3 Hitech HS-65MG metal gear for the cyclic and collective pitch on the main rotor
1 Futaba S9257 Digital Tail Rotor Servo
Gyro: Logitech LGT-2100T heading lock gyro (for the tail)
Flight Recorder: Flight Data Recorder from Eagle Tree Avianoics
Brushless Motor: Stock ACE Brushless Motor
Brushless Speed Controller: Stock ACE Brushless Electronic Speed Controller

The Eagle Tree Flight Data Recorder records voltage and current used and allows me to graph out power consumption from the motor and servos on my PC so I can see how to better tune or improve the helicopter towards better performance.

The cyclic and collective on the main rotor is controlled using eCCPM (electronic Cyclic, Collective, and Pitch Mixing). eCCPM allows 3 servos to perform the same function as 4 to 5 servos in a mechanically mixed system, but it requires stronger servos as the load from the head is the same as it would be with 4 to 5 servos. eCCPM is pretty much the standard these days. My older Nitro Raptor 60 and Nitro Raptor 50 used mCCPM, mechanical mixing.

Please check out the photos below for some pics of the Mini-Titan’s internals, it is a bit dusty, I was hoping Sunday’s flight would help remove some of it, but I may just need to use some canned duster on it.

Mowed the lawns, flew the heli

JonC — Sun, 03 May 2009 20:05:12 +0000

I mowed the lawn and got a couple flights in with the Mini-Titan helicopter. It’s a great little heli, though there’s not a lot of room in the yard, yet, to get really crazy with it, I just buzz around over the back yard. There’s an R/C club a few miles away I might join, if they don’t mind helicopters. A lot of places don’t like these ‘dagblasted whirly birds’ flying around their airplanes

As you can see in the pic of the other side yard, it hasn’t been taken care of yet, I’ll probably work on raking out the dead wild violet roots, filling in the holes and sunken spots this week evenings and put some grass seed down. I’ve started to cut back on watering of the peninsula lawn, I want to force the grass to start extending it’s roots down into the soil so that it will hopefully be decently established by the time our smoldering summer comes along.

Jon's Home Blog » Helicopter

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My ACE Mini-Titan e325 Setup as of This Posting:

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