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/

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I recently drove some equipment down to Florida with a co-worker and saw a couple of weird/cool things on the way back up from Florida.

I’m sure there’s a perfectly good excuse for having a dinosaur in the back of the truck. As we drove past he had a couple of smaller dinosaurs strapped to the roof and just gave me an ‘eh, y’know’ look when we went past.

The other one is a huge water or sewage pump. It had a giant motor on the top of it, but it was pretty neat looking on the truck like that.

Here are the photos.

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Humans can do pretty amazing things when it does not involve dealing with other human beings. For some reason we can go to the moon, send ships to mars and the moon, and we do it, for the most part, pretty darn well. If you want to feel good about being human, look at some of our technological achievements rather than our humanitarian ones. Run over to the NASA website and check out some of the amazing stuff we’re doing with space travel, the Hubble space telescope, all of the Mars projects and landers, the quality of the photography is often quite stunning and amazing.

Recently Arizona State Universty and NASA’s LROC project has been sending back some excellent high resolution moon photos for a little bit now and the teams have been making a few of them available. If you’re a fan of space and related stuff it’s definetly worth going over to their site to check it out.  Click on the photo, on that site, then click again, and again and so on to zoom into them, some of them show incredible detail.

At the same time, we also produce a lot of stuff like this, a crazy lady who thinks the rainbow in her sprinklers are a goverment plot. She’s probably a chemtrail believer too, that’s kind of a scary group, but at least it keeps them away from the airports.  Chemtrailers are like your crazy relative who goes on constantly about evil government plots. In this group it’s  people who think that the condensation streams you see behind jet-liners actually contain, or occasionally contain, secret chemicals in an effort to test chemical weapons and other things on the US population. I think the signal to noise ratio improves a bit with seeing the results of real science and research.  The chemtrailers and their related ilk are among the same crowd who believe that the moon landings were fake and filmed on a sound stage.

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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.

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This news article was too good to pass up. Apparently these people have been dragging up live missiles for a few years now. The one in the picture sure looks like a Sidewinder air-to-air missile.  I would have dumped it back myself.  I love explosives and technology, but this is really too much to ‘hang onto’. According to the article the missile was still live! Some people get all the good ‘life stories’! The other one the guy caught previous had blinking lights, was still trying to live, and appeared to have an active camera.  If you’re not sure what that all means, you should look into how a missile like the sidewinder works.

As a reference, here’s a rack of varying Sidewinder missiles.   As a work of the US Federal Government, this image is Public Domain.

Various Sidewinder Missiles - Public Domain Image

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A few orange Iris’ spawned on the road edge by the highway, they’re pretty nice looking as well.   Additionally some more blue and white ones have shown up, and look exactly like the ones shown earlier this month.

We had some timed exposure fun tonight out in the yard.  I’m surprised one of us wasn’t mauled by a possum or rogue coyote but we got some good pics.   A couple of the pictures were taken with sparklers, the rest of them with flashlights, an LED Pen and a laser pointer.

I drew on the side of the house with the laser pointer in one experiment.  It turned out ok though I wish the streetlight hadn’t flooded the area so much.  Live in the middle of nowhere and the only streetlight within half a mile is right in front of my house.

See the descriptions on the pictures for info about what was used.  When you click on a picture, use the left and right icons at the bottom of the pictures to move through the list.

If interested, please check out my other Light Art Posts

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