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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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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Mini-Titan e325 Night Flying LED Setup Progress

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Analyzing Your Radio Controlled Helicopters Current Consumption

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

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Finally Decent Flips and Rolls on the Mini-Titan

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Some Thoughts On Recording Aerial Video with a Small RC Helicopter

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

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

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Mowed the lawns, flew the heli

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