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:
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.
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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.
Power Supplies
This little power supply from Ready Made RC is a tremendous bargain. The specs are fantastic on paper – but it doesn’t pack quite as much punch as advertised. I have two large capacity (5200mAh) 6S batteries that I use to power my electric lawn mower. This power supply buckled after just 2.5 charges 😞 Here’s how it went…
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I’m in Le Drib’s vlog!
Actually my plane was in Drew’s vlog earlier this summer. If you don’t subscribe to his channel on YouTube, you should.
He was at Flite Fest East and flew his quad in the one combat session I dared enter. My plane is a white FT Flyer with blue stripes on the leading edge of the wing, along with American flags on the wings and vertical stabilizer 🇺🇸 It was also sporting a streamer that day 🎉
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