Be Excellent To Each Other

Properly nearly fell forwards down the sand bank yesterday.

I'm watching Drone Racing League on Sky. It's really good!

I'd be interested to see it. So far most "serious" racing I've seen with them has ended up being a bit of a mess of difficulties with video feeds or a lot of races where every competitor crashes out until there's just one left doing slow laps. Do they show the live video or is it edited together from the on board HD recording cams?

Yes, it is!

It is mixture of FPS and third person. Looks amazing.

Good fun racing this morning until Zardoz crashed into a mud hazard. Do they have mud hazards on the thing on Sky or is it not that advanced?

It had a ufo, a tractor beam and a ribcage.

Looks like it's ok after a rise and blast dry. Popped that loose wire back into the VTX but I'll leave it until tomorrow before I fire it back up.

Been looking at those Hornet Wings. Look highly like a next purchase.

I gave my son one of my RC cars recently, a 2wd Tamiya buggy and he absolutely loves it. I asked my daughter if she'd like to have a buggy too so they could play together and while she enjoyed it she wasn't that bothered until I said, "you can get all sorts of other cars, I could even make an Ice cream van".

She was very struck on this idea so I've got myself a bit of a project on now.

She'd probably love one of those Hornet racing wings for Christmas.

Absolutely.

And a Horizon A-10.

Yesterday morning's shenanigans. Nice flying and outstanding crashing from Zardoz:



These mini quads can really take a beating.

I'm thinking about getting The Grimlet a quad for Christmas. Are there any reasonably-priced ones that are easy to fly (for a nine year-old) and virtually indestructible?

There's loads. Is it for The Grimlet or "for The Grimlet"?

A little from column A...

Half price at Argos, there's this one:

http://www.argos.co.uk/product/4086910

Which is made of foam and uses ducted fans but it has a built in battery so it's five minutes of fun then half an hour of waiting.

This is a smaller but better one, again it uses ducted fans:

https://www.modelsport.co.uk/blade-indu ... cts/394323

And you can buy extra batteries for a couple of quid each.

No cameras on either of those, though if that's what you're after.

Nice flying/filming there Mark.

Did quite a bit of walking yesterday. Glad everything was brought home in one piece.

...apart from my flying stool!!!

That looks hardy as fuck, though. Ta!

It's perhaps hard to appreciate how insanely good this is unless you've tried to fly one of these things but fucking hell this kid can fly:



Young lad from the UK, I think he's only about 16 and this is a final of some race against the best in the world. You see his opponents for all of about two seconds at the start of the race

Bloody hell! That's insane.

Where/what the frig is that place?

I'd have enough trouble just figuring out where the bloody course was, let alone be able to fly around it.

Olly has asked for a remote control car for Christmas. Anyone got any recommendations for one that's going to be easy enough for a 4 year old to use, sturdy enough that it won't break the first time he smashes it into a wall, and cheap enough that I won't have to remortgage my house to buy it?

Would it be for indoor / outdoor use, Jem?

These are pretty good for little folk:

https://www.wirelessmadness.com/carrera ... r-ca162060

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSiPq02KV-E

No good if you want to use on grass etc though.

Edit: There's another one they do that's a bit more suitable for rougher ground, cheaper too:
http://www.toysrus.co.uk/toys/nintendo- ... 0wodjbgPPQ

Brilliant, that's perfect. Cheers

Definitely going to try making one of these 3D printed planes:

https://3dlabprint.com/shop/zivko-edge- ... h-replica/

My 3D printed P38 is coming along well. It really is just like building a massive Airfix kit:





Quite satisfying to have made it all from scratch, ok so a robot did most of the work. But I had to tell it what to do and swear when I told it the wrong things so it still counts.

All the parts are now printed so I started doing a bit of work with some silver car wheel paint from a rattle can and then just a brush and some acrylics:



Got most of the bits to fit inside, it needs a lot of gubbins to fly this one, though. Two motors, two batteries, two ESCs, possibly two receivers, three servoless retracts and nine servos. Should keep me busy for a few evenings.

Looking good!

Why might it need two receivers?

He's set it up using twelve channels which would mean using two Frsky Rxs linked together or at least some sort of SBUS device. There's two servos for rudder, two for elevator, two for the flaps, two ailerons, throttle and the three retracts. Although I'm not sure why he's not just used a y-lead for some of these. It should really only need six channels.

Ah right.

Yeah, I imagine it'd be much simpler (and cheaper) to set up with Y leads, if there's enough internal space down the inside of the booms.

I think though that you would need to reverse some of the servos, which you can do by opening them up and swapping some wires around. I dunno it's a faff either way, just depends if you prefer faffing around programming a radio or with a soldering iron.

[possible stupid question alert]
Couldn't you turn them upside down?

No it's a very sensible question because that's exactly what you'd normally do and I might still be able do that. But from what I've seen the way this is designed the printed bowden type pushrod runs don't really make that very easy at all. If it was balsa or foam you'd just hack bits out and make it work but this type of construction makes that sort of thing less easy.

I guess he didn't fancy making two separate files for the left and right fuselages but rather just mirrored them or maybe he only realised after he'd finished. There are one or two very minor areas where it's apparent that although he's a brilliantly talented CAD engineer he is perhaps less experienced with building RC stuff.

Turn the entire fuselage section upside down

First flight of the year (after first crash of the year).



Not sure how I missed the post at 1:12

Goes a fair old clip!

Yeah, feels very fast flying them FPV.

Hard to keep up with Mark at times because he fitted a lag switch to mine.

That's the only thing that annoys me about the Phantom 4 I've got - in "Sport" mode it's capable of speeds of 44mph, but the horizon always stays level in the video view thanks to the gimbal, so it doesn't "feel" right.

Doesn't seem to be a way of turning it off either.

Could you do it manually by unplugging the motors and mechanically fixing it somehow? Either way I'm not sure I'd want to risk stuffing a Phantom 4. These little things take some terrible abuse and normally just bust a prop if that. Just sell it and buy a mini quad, they're loads more fun.

Just been watching my video from that morning, still had my camera rolling for when Z crashed his mini quad into the ground and his subsequent analysis of what went wrong, "I went too low". Yup

Didn't help that the ground was high either.

They're insanely tough. I've dropped mine from great heights and speeds I've stacked mine from and been able to fly again within minutes* is brilliant.

Best toy ever.

Glue.

Replacement canopy for Vampire ordered. I'll use the base of my current cracked one to add an FPV camera and VTX.

I'm going to print out another canopy for the P38 to put a camera on and maybe FPV kit later if it's not too tricky to fly.

Have you thought of a decent place to take off from?

The beach. Might get away with the college though. The main wheels are really big it's just the nose wheel that's a bit tiny. I've propped it for thrust with some big 10x5s rather than top speed to begin with though so it should get off the ground fairly quick.

Be nice FPVing through the rugby posts with the Lightning and Vampire.

In fact, it would be sick.

You need a Zero of some description. We could go to the boating lake when they're out with their model boats and reenact Pearl Harbour.

Yeah, the model boaters would love that. If I was going to buy another scaler it would be a Zero.

Or maybe the new Durafly 109.

Or that EDF A-10.

I'm looking at Zeros. Again.

http://www.banggood.com/HSD-Zero-Fighte ... ent=227736