I had an opportunity to attend RCX with my kids as it was during spring break. My expectations were set from a 2016 video by RC Sparks:
Garden Railway Bed Installation
After choosing a suitable layout and location for the crawler course and garden railway, it was time to lay the foundation.
I called 811 to make sure I wasn’t going to run into any buried pipes or wires, it was time to start digging ⛏️ The issue I needed to solve is that the selected area for my garden railway and crawler course is sloped.
Crawler Course & Garden Railway Design
We had a 1:24 scale Christmas last year, which was fun to set up under the tree. While the SCX24 RC crawler is small, the G-scale trains are decidedly big once you factor in the layout. I’ve always loved model trains and had a layout as a kid, but in my home it would be impossible to dedicate a room to model trains. Why not go outside?
Large scale trains are popular for garden railways, and I had a section of yard that was completely unused. But it won’t be for just trains – I want it to be a multi-modal play area: trains, crawlers, maybe even a landing pad for an RC helicopter 🚂🚙🚁
This site isn’t transforming into a model railroad blog (at least not permanently), but the next few posts will be about the train setup as groundwork before the crawler course is installed. Hopefully you can enjoy it all under the guise of RC and Trail & Scale 😎
Garden Bed & Trains
For the area, I purchased some Vita 4’x4’x11″ vinyl garden beds from Costco. They came as a 2-pack that you can combine to make a 8’x8′ area. I bought two of those packs which let me combine them to make a 12’x20′ area.
Before I did any digging, I loosely fit the vinyl bed parts together in the yard to make sure I knew that the space would be appropriate
Solar Charging Setup
There’s a place I like to race at in St. Peter, MN called Shamrock RC Raceway. It’s an interesting setup because it’s a turf track set up outdoors in a hockey rink that would otherwise go unused in the summer. Rather than bring an insane extension cord to power my charger from the park restroom, I wanted to come up with a more portable (and green) charging solution.
So I put together this simple solar charging setup:
Flite Fest Ohio 2018
Flite Fest Ohio 2018 is on the books – we went, we flew, we crashed. Here’s a little brain-dump of lessons learned from our second year.
More Stick Time
My first year I spent a lot of time building a project that ultimately didn’t fly. For me it was a disappointment. So this year I did a build ahead of time and planned to do much more flying. It turned out to be much more crashing because I didn’t have all of the bugs worked out of my plane. It did fly, and it helped me achieve my goal of more stick time at the event. However, the stick time paled in comparison to the time I spend in the bean field looking for my plane after a crash. You haven’t fully experienced Flite Fest until you’ve gone looking for a downed plane in the bean field.
[Read more…]
Flysky iA6 RX – telemetry and failsafe with OpenTX
I ordered an iA6 receiver for a flying wing I picked up at the local R/C swap meet. It took 30 days to get here from China. 😒 How have I not learned not to order stuff during the Chinese New Year? Once I got it, there were a few tricks and troubles I went through, so here’s the rundown.
I specifically purchased the Turnigy iA6 (same as FS-iA6) instead of the iA6B for a few reasons. It has leads coming off of the top instead of the end, so it’s effectively shorter when servo connectors are plugged in. Perfect for the Techone Mini-Popwing which has a small receiver cut-out. It also has a rudimentary telemetry system built in, and the first version (non-B) can be hacked very easily to provide battery voltage telemetry to the transmitter.
The telemetry hack is well covered in the RCGroups link above, so I won’t go into it, but will outline a couple other issues I encountered.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 6
- Next Page »