Hi, all. This is a build of the FPVWRA Spec Wing kit from Wind Catcher RC. Departures from the stock build are cutting down the winglets (for personalization mostly), cutting foam windows out of the tips (saved only 10g of weight so it ended up just being aesthetic I guess), and using the vi3telit3 motor mount found here. I also put the camera on a pan servo since I like flying that way much more, but it definitely increases drag and decreases durability.

Equipment:
Turnigy D2826-6 2200Kv motor/ APC 6x5.5 prop
Turnigy F30 ESC
Nano-tech 3s 2200mAh battery
Corona DS939HV servos
Frsky RX4R Rx
RDQ Mach 1 VTx
Foxeer Arrow micro cam

AUW...Continue Reading

Hi, all. Next rebuild of this little plane is to take it from a 2.4GHz/5.8Ghz setup to a 900MHz/1.3GHz setup to practice with long range gear and INAV before I finish my next build. Should be great for putzing around golf courses and whatnot.

Materials:
-3mm XPS (HK brand depron)
-4mm x 1mm flat CF
-1/4in x 1/8in balsa stick
-1/16in balsa sheet
-1/16in polyethylene (for skidplates)
-packing tape (red, black)
-Foam Tac, hot glue, CA
-rando neodymium magnets

Electronics:
-RCX 1306 2300Kv motor / TGY 5x5" prop
-DYS 12A ESC
-CNHL 3s 350mAh packs
-Matek F411-MINI FC
-FrSky R9MM Rx
-Turnigy 5g servos
-Foxeer arrow micro cam on a pan servo
-200mW 1.3GHz VTx, homemade dipole antenna
-misc. voltage regulators, 5V and 12V

Specs:
-750mm span
-12dm^2 area
-0.3 taper ratio
-270mm sweep
-KFm4 foil
-172g (1p) / 203g (2p) AUW

EDIT: It flies! Here is proof:

Viper 2.2 (2 min 7 sec)

...Continue Reading

Hi, all. This is a quick and simple FPV plane for small field and proximity flying. It's a rebuild of my previous such plane with revised reinforcements, a new wing with a bit larger span, and miscellaneous practical improvements. It has camera pan on the rudder stick, a thrust to weight greater than one, and can clip onto an FPV backpack.

Materials:
-3mm XPS (HK brand depron)
-4mm x 1mm flat CF
-1/4in x 1/8in balsa stick
-1/16in balsa sheet
-1/16in polyethylene (for skidplates)
-packing tape (red, black)
-Foam Tac, hot glue

Electronics:
-RCX 1306 2300Kv motor / 5x5" prop
-DYS 12A ESC
-CNHL 3s 350mAh
-FrSky X4r
-Turnigy 5g servos
-Foxeer arrow micro cam
-Quanum QE66 VTx

Specs:
-750mm span
-12dm^2 area
-0.3 taper ratio
-270mm sweep
-160g...Continue Reading

Hi, all. This is my latest flying wing design, it's a parkflyer/warmliner kind of machine. This one has a couple special things about it. First, it keeps the scheme of my last wing where the elevons are twisted by a servo at each end, which is a very low drag way to deflect the control surfaces, and allows for center flaps for high lift. The biggest downsides to the flying wing platform have historically been large induced drag from trimming to different lift coefficients, and the 'lift valley' that develops in swept wings and reduces the maximum lift coefficient. Second, it has its control linkages recessed into the wing, instead of pushrods it has what I'm calling 'bendrods'. This means that there are no blunt objects in the airflow, since they're flush with the wing at most deflections. This is a clean ship that will really come into its own when the motor is shut off. Assuming it flies.

Materials:
-1/16in balsa sheeting
-1/8inx1/4in balsa rods
-3/8inx3/8in balsa rods
-2mm CF rods
-3mm XPS foam
-Econokote (white, red, black)
-CA/kicker
-Foam Tac
-hot glue

Components:
-Tornado T2 1800Kv motor
-Aeronaut 7x6 folding prop
-Aikon 20A ESC
-Turnigy 3s 1300mAh battery
-FrSky X6R Rx
-Diatone 5V 2A regulator
-rando HK 12g servos

Specs:
-1100mm span
-20dm^2 area
-0.8 taper ratio
-265mm sweep
-445g AUW (though I needed 15g of clay in the nose to hit my (conservative) CG target marks, I'll see how much of that I can remove)

EDIT: One of my friends shot...Continue Reading

Hi, all. This is a simple delta wing foamy for FPV. It's got a basic KF foil, plenty of motor, and a OSD camera on a pan servo.

Materials:
-3mm XPS (HK brand depron)
-5mm tube/4mm flat CF
-packing tape

Electronics:
-RCX 1306 2300Kv/5" prop
-DYS 12A ESC
-CNHL 3s 350mAh
-FrSky X4r
-Turnigy 5g servos
-Foxeer arrow micro cam
-Quanum QE66 VTx

Specs:
-600mm span
-12dm^2 area
-0.25 taper ratio
-300mm sweep
-165g...Continue Reading

Hi, all. New iteration of flying wing.

Materials:
- 3mm depron
- 2/3mm CF
- packing tape

Electronics:
- TGY 2212/06 2200Kv, with APC 6x4
- HK F30 ESC
- TGY nano-tech 1300mAh 3s
- FrSky X6R, plus analog voltage monitor
- 7g (inboard), 10g (outboard) HK servos

Specs:
- 1250mm span
- 25dm^2 area
- 0.8 reference taper ratio
- 300mm sweep (determined by CG balancing spreadsheet)
- 487g AUW

This is primarily different from previous wings I've done in that it has a thinner wing skin with ribs to save weight, and I've done something new with the elevons.
The elevons are intentionally compliant in torsion. Normally that's bad for flutter reasons, but there's a servo at each end to restrain them. But this means that the servos can twist the elevons.
For roll, only the outboard servos deflect. This produces a smooth twist in the elevon along the span.
For pitch, the outboards deflect normally (pitch up, flap up), but the inboards deflect opposite that, increasing the twist of the elevon. Adding camber to the root is nearly pitch neutral for this particular configuration, but it is tailored to keep the lift distribution near elliptical throughout the flight envelope. It also cancels out the loss of lift from the outboard pitch-up reflex, keeping maximum lift close to that of the plain wing with no elevon deflection.
Or so my XFLR5 tells me.

TL;DR: This is gonna be a fast wing with great high lift abilities due to some twisty flaps....Continue Reading

Hi, all. Miniquad.

Frame: 120mm, 0.3mm uni CF plates, 2mm aramid honeycomb (arms), 3mm (body), 1/16" ply motor hardpoints
Board: Kakute F4 AIO
ESCs: DYS 7A, blheli_s
Motors: RCX 1306, 2300Kv
Props: GF5030
Rx: FrSky XSR-M
VTx: QE66 600mW
Cam: some 3g thing from...Continue Reading

Hi, all. New plane.

Design mission: A smaller, slower flyer that can operate in small fields and places not as isolated as an AMA airfield safely. Good efficiency, light as possible and aerobatic.

Configuration: 900mm span conventional plane with a tractor prop, minimal fuselage, thin tail boom, large control surfaces, full span flaperons, and no landing gear. (NEVER landing gear! )

Construction: 3mm gray depron sheeting and 0.75oz fiberglass cloth for most surfaces, with ZAP finishing epoxy as the matrix. Wing spars and the tail boom will be made from CF pultrusions. This construction technique will be new to me, so I'm bound to make mistakes. This is a practice plane, more than anything, for what I'll be building next.

Equipment: 1500kv Blue Wonder swinging a 9x6 prop, Nanotech 2s 850mAh battery, KEDA 12A ESC, Lemon RX 6ch reciever. Hobbyking 11g servos in the wings, TowerPro 13g carbon servos for the tail surfaces.


Construction completed on 4/10/16. AUW: 300g Looks:

Maiden: Pretty good. Lots of turbulence but it took it well.
The plane is agile and has snappy response around all axes. Climbing performance is nice and the plane is plenty fast, you can tell that it is very slippery. The big 9x6 windmilling is a huge drag brake though, so I might have to look into a folding prop.
It still slows down very nice, especially with flaps down. It can fly reasonably in a 150 foot square field. I'll have to wait for calmer conditions to push the low speed...Continue Reading

I've got a friend going off to college at the end of this summer, and he can't bring his planes 'cuz they're all enormous (They all have fuselages. And tails! It's horrible). So I'm making him a quick and dirty 2s wing to cart off to academia. I'm not going to to a full log on this, since after day 1 I'm almost done.
It's finished as far as I can do it, my friend needs to do the final balancing and Rx connections.

900mm span, 1500kv blue wonder motor, 8x4 prop, 10A ESC, 1300mAh 2s battery. DTF construction with minimal reinforcement, 3 mil laminate covering....Continue Reading

After a long series of small tweaks to the falcon 5B and a good deal of research into flying wing lift distributions, I decided that the changes were big enough to constitute a new airframe.
So, I give you the mark 7. Fast as a speeding bullet, strength of a hundred men, hyperbole of a billion pundits.


It is an incremental improvement in a variety of areas. It will have a better spar layup, hopefully increasing stiffness. It will only have elevons in the outboard ~60% of the wing, as elevons in the inboard region are counterproductive in pitch. It will have more washout and better distributed washout for an actually planned out lift distribution and a specific design CL. It will use the 3 mil laminate from the famed Assassin that Meanbaby gave me, so the packing tape is no longer a structural member. This frees up the trim scheme a bit, as you can see in the below picture. It also allows the LE and TE of the elevons to be non-parallel, permitting better optimization. The laminate also provides a good means to secure a fixed TE to the inboard portion of the wing.
It will use more intelligently designed (and effective, therefore smaller) ventilation. I am also using only the Metric system, after becoming thoroughly fed up with the Imperial one (who the heck puts 16 ounces in a pound? what do those words even mean?), so that's a huge improvement.

I will be trying to put in an hour of building each day right after school, to get it running by the time the Warwick Fun...Continue Reading

I am now the proud owner of some sick Nano QX skills as well as some FPV gear, so it is time to kick things up about 300 notches. Since this is my first multicopter build, I will be basing it mostly on someone else's design; David Windestal's tricopter 2.5. I will be making my own gusset plates from light ply instead of G10 fiberglass, as well as my own yaw mech. I will be using his construction style for a vibration isolation camera/battery tray, and friction stop folding front arms.
The FPV camera will velcro to the front of the battery tray, and the VRx will attach to the rear landing skid. (people always put a new skid on the copter for this - don't see why) I will be running it off of the usual turnigy 2200mAh 3s 20C battery, though current draw at max RPM will be ~24C. I will not be racing with this and the flight controller limits it to 90% RPM anyway, so I think it will be fine. I can use the parallel harnesses from the falcon mk. 6 to remedy this, though. I am also getting a properly hot soldering iron to do the power harness right, and a prop balancer as an investment to compensate for the fact that I am buying cheapo props.

Parts list: KK2.1.5 flight board, Afro 20A ESC's, TGY 5A UBEC to power the M2-8 rail, TGY D2836/11 750Kv motors (functionally equivalent to DT750's), Corona 939MG digital yaw servo, cheap HK 11x4.7 props (also in the green and CW variety), a 5mm motor shaft for the yaw axle.
Misc: 600mm servo extensions, twisted Rx-flight board male to...Continue Reading

Hi, all. After a month and a half of backorder delays, the Quanum FPV bundle set finally arrived. This is my first FPV equipment, so I cannot give a competent review but I can give my impressions on the setup and construction from an FPV noob's perspective - the intended market of HK for this product.
Please note that before the hat comes in, the build is the same as HobbyKing's build video, so you can refer to that if you prefer.
I also got a wide angle lens, is fits the camera perfectly and has maybe 20-30 degrees of FoV more than the stock lens.
The camera's resolution is not very high, but it is serviceable. You cannot read the titles of books at 5 meters, but you can still see there are books there. It seems to handle contrasting light conditions pretty well, I was able to see the stuff inside my apartment along with the glare around the windows at about the same lighting level. When I pointed it at a light fixture then down at the floor there was a 1~1.5 second delay before is adjusted to the new brightness level, so that means seamless transitions from looking at the sun to the ground will not happen. However, all this simple imaging power (or lack of) has an upside:
The setup has very low latency, I was not able to see any by moving my hand around in front of the camera. I pointed the camera at the screen to create an infinite loop, and it is possible to see the delay travel down to infinity that way, but the fact remains that the delay from camera to screen is...Continue Reading

Hi, all. To teach myself how to fly multirotors as a prelude to hopefully building one, I followed the advice of many people more knowledgeable than me and got a nano qx. I am very impressed by the frame itself, it is stiff in the directions it needs to be but incredibly flexible in all others, I do not think it is possible to break it under its own power. I am complete rubbish at flying it, of course, but given how zippy it is at low rates and its available power, I can tell it has the potential to become sportier to suit one's increasing skill.
They say it can be flown in a small living room and they are absolutely right. If you are good at hovering, you can spot land on really any surface. I have been getting about 5 minute flight times out of it, granted they are with my old 1s 150mAh batteries from the micro P-51 Mustang. The one battery it came with seems to have 6-7 minutes in it. I love the USB charger they came up with, it saves a fortune on AA's and in super convenient.
One important note - if you are serious about multirotors you will be flying it in non-autolevel mode (agility mode). I have never heard of anyone else having this problem, nor has Horizon's customer service, but if in agility mode you inexplicably have no lateral control with the right stick (no pitch or roll) but you do have yaw and throttle, you need to keep the flaps switch in the down (1) position, not toggle it back up after the quad's light goes red. Took me a good while to figure that one...Continue Reading

A little late on the processing, but here's a couple more:

Some nice air video spliced with ground video courtesy of Mark, it looks really cool.

Falcon Mk.V - Thrill Factor (6 min 8 sec)

A compilation of 3 flights from Peter's HawkSky, managed to get a little ground footage in there.

Hawksky Highlights 11-22-14 (4 min 47 sec)

...Continue Reading

Some more of my wingman Peter flying his Dynam Hawksky around the field, climbing and diving around.

Peter's HawkSky - Pushing It (3 min 39 sec)

I binge watched Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd so I could sync the flight to the song. This is the Falcon Mk.V with Peter's Mobius action cam (wide angle lens) stuck into the right air intake, and shows the plane's amazing ability as both a motorglider and a pylon racer. Some good climb and glide segments, then 5 minutes of carving sweeps around the field, low passes, and lots of loops and stuff.
This was filmed on 11/15/14 at the Remote Control Society of Marine Park, it was one of those days where it is cold but the air is perfectly clear, so the high altitude video is stunning. There is another video from that day, I should have it processed by tomorrow.

Falcon Mk.V - Free as a Bird (10 min 51 sec)

Hi, all. Made a cutting edge, super lightweight, crash resistant mounting system for future mobuis action cam flights. This is some real next level stuff, super streamlined and engineered for VICTORY. The world has never seen nor will ever see again this degree of prescision....
Ok it's a mobius shaped box with tape covering. It has little spacers inside so it doesn't push the buttons. The top panel comes off so you can put the camera in it. It's made of foam. That's about it.

Flying at RCSMP in October. My wingman Peter McGyvered a Mobius action cam to his old HawkSky and gives us a good view of the field. The Falcon Mk. V also makes a few guest appearances.

HawkSky with onboard Mobius at RCSMP (3 min 54 sec)

The Buzzard's motor has been rendered inoperable because of its tractor configuration and proximity to the ground upon landing (read: front motor dun got messed up when I landed). The new aircraft using the 2s power system will be something I have wanted to try for a while; a slightly forward swept flying wing with strakes. It will have a small fuselage pod and twin vertical fins, pusher prop, and a 4-flap wing ('cuz I have way too many 5g servos to use). I might try out 7x6 props on it instead of 8x4's, since this should be more controllable at high speeds than the Buzzard.
When drawing it out in sketchup, I figured I couldn't move the fins back far enough behind the CG for them to be super effective, so I thought I might need rudders on it to stay coordinated. Then I thought only needs 1 servo+makes use of ability to spin out+also gives yaw control=THRUST VECTORING YAW. So I'm going to try my hand at making a hinging motor mount.

10/19: All parts are cut out, but nothing is taped. Spars are embedded in the wing and the KF steps are in place.
10/21: Flaps are beveled, and I made a torsion bar for the elevators.
10/24: Control surfaces and the wing are taped up, the fuse sides are glued in and the fuse bottom is attached to those. All servos are glued in place and connections to the Rx are hooked up.
10/26: Elevators are connected, the TV yaw block is constructed, the top wall of the fuse is shaped to accommodate all the stuff under it
11/2: The fuse top is installed,...Continue Reading

Note to self-think of better name for airboat than "Airboat"
Done- "Drake", a male duck (waterfowl-get it? yeah).

Same hull design as the last one, but this time it is made of MPF. The fins at the back will also be higher to capture more of the propwash with the rudders.

5/26: Frame and lower hull are complete.
6/19: rudders are done, the motor is mounted, and the deck is on. The receivers arrived, so this ship is ready to sail.
6/29: Wind flipped it over, will dry the parts out overnight. If the ESC still works, I will try it in the Falcon mk.V to see if it gets it working.
6/30: ESC still works

Status: Gutted for parts