Long-term Memory

After way to long, I finally found some time/weather combination to fly again. I’m a little embarrassed it took so long…

Of course, all my batteries were fairly dead. The glow heater was completely gone (0V), but was still usable after charging. My starter-battery was dead beyond repair. The LiPo’s of the miniTitan were is fairly good shape after more than a year in the fridge: 3/4th charged.

Before the flights, I upgrade my CastleLink software to version 3.40.0, and upgraded the ESC firmware to 3.27 along with these (PDF) new settings.
Continue reading ‘Flight log 2011-10-15’ »

The graphs of the ESC logging data I made earlier aren’t as pretty as HTML5 allows… So I retried it using HighCharts and a bit of JavaScript. The result is a standalone LogViewer page which interprets and graphs the log data entirely client-side. The page itself is fairly boring until you feed in a log file.

Clearly I’m not a layout specialist, but the functionality is there.

Place: Home
Batteries flown: 0.2
Time flown: 0h07 (cumulative model timer: 4h40)
Flight battery recharged with: (2) <not recharged>
Tx battery recharged with: <not recharged>

Comments:
Got my miniTitan repaired; at around €20 it was fairly cheap. But the governor-config still needed to be done. So I gave the collective a punch while in a hoover and noticed a drop in RPM, as it was last time. I changed the settings to have a governor gain at “Medium (25)” instead of “Low (15)”.

Continue reading ‘Flight log – 2010-08-09’ »

Place: Home
Batteries flown: 0.2
Time flown: 0h03 (cumulative model timer: 4h33)
Flight battery recharged with: (2) 2398 mAh (after full discharge)
Tx battery recharged with: <not recharged>

Comments:
My miniTitan was repaired and had a new ESC. Time for the first test flight. After a minute of hoovering, I shortly pushed full collective to check the governor. The headspeed dropped, not surprisingly since the governor is set to it’s lowest setting. So I pushed full collective again, to see if the governor is able to compensate.

Again the rotor headspeed dropped. The governor did compensate, but only the motor rpm increased, not the rotor’s… And then the ground intervened. I squeezed the remaining rpm’s out of the rotor to soften the crash, but it did hit fairly hard.

Continue reading ‘Flight log – 2010-07-14’ »

As mentioned, my new ESC also has data-logging capabilities. The provided software actually has a fairly descend viewer, but it lacks some features.

Continue reading ‘ESC data logging’ »

Place: Roeselare
Tanks flown: 0.1
Time flown: 0h15 (cumulative model timer: 32h22)
Rx battery recharged with: 885 mAh
Tx battery recharged with: 273 mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 825 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 132 mAh

Comments:
Looking for, buying and rennovating a house appears to have a remarkable ability to consume every bit of spare time I had. I finally found some time to wake my bird from hibernation.

I topped the batteries to compensate their self-discharge during the last 10 months. I wasn’t expecting my nitro-engine to start smoothly, but it worked perfectly.
I only hoovered a bit around to regain my muscle memory.

Place: Halle

Raptor
Tanks flown: 1
Time flown: 0h18 (cumulative model timer: 32h07)
Rx battery recharged with: 428+197 mAh
Tx battery recharged with: 548 mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 1246 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 450-ish mAh (forgot to note down)

miniTitan
Flights: 0.5
Time flown: 0h06 (cumulative model timer: 3h23)
Heli battery recharged with: (2) balanced 2181 mAh;
Tx battery recharged with: see above

Comments:
Went flying after dinner, the wind had calmed down and the rain had stopped.

I had some trouble starting my Raptor (glow heater indicated only 1A instead of the usual 5A). Since it’s been a while since I charged it, the battery was dead. A few minutes at the charger solved the problem.

In the mean time, I took my miniTitan out. Did some flying back and forth and a few stall turns to regain confidence. Next I did some back-flips. This is where it went wrong. On my 3rd back-flip, I intended to keep the heli inverted for a second and continue the back-flip, but the ground intervened…

Continue reading ‘Flight log – 2009-07-25’ »

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 2
Time flown: 0h30 (cumulative model timer: 31h49)
Rx battery recharged with: 1244 mAh
Tx battery recharged with: 491 mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 1397 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 54 mAh

Comments:
A very windy but beautiful day. Did some basic flying around (stall turn, circuit). Also retried flying inverted for several seconds with success.

Added 1 turn of pitch to the “black” blade to adjust the tracking

Place: Halle

Raptor
Tanks flown: 2
Time flown: 0h27 (cumulative model timer: 31h19)
Rx battery recharged with: <see below> mAh
Tx battery recharged with: 559 mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 1300 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 1250 mAh

miniTitan
Flights: 2
Time flown: 0h21 (cumulative model timer: 3h17)
Heli battery recharged with: (1) balanced 1934 mAh; (2) balanced 2137 mAh;
Tx battery recharged with: see above

Comments:
Went flying after work. It was fairly windy, but the wind was fairly constant. I practiced the maneuvers I’ve been doing in the sim lately: autorotation and inverted flight, both successful!

Inverted flight worked out fairly well. I started by doing backflips. Next I stopped halfway through the backflip and tried to keep it stable. I only need to work on my reflexes to get me out of inverted trouble. Obviously pushing the throttle/pitch up is not the best idea… Luckily I had (just) enough height to correct my peculiar situation.

The miniTitan held up fairly well in the winds, although I was more busy fighting the wind than flying. I increased the CCMP-mixing from 50% to 75% on the elevator and ailerons. Now it is more vivid, just like my raptor. I tried some backflips as well, but the wind made this a challange.

Continue reading ‘Flight log – 2009-04-23’ »

Place: Halle
Tanks flown: 2
Time flown: 1h00 (cumulative model timer: 30h52)
Rx battery recharged with: 272+392+overnight trickle mAh (again)
Tx battery recharged with: 489+overnight trickle mAh
Glow heater battery recharged with: 1473 mAh
Starter battery recharged with: 498 mAh

Comment:
Before this flight, I adjusted the pitch and throttle curves and activated the IdleUp2 position. This is the updated table from before:

Today was the first day with reasonable weather. It was still windy, but almost no gusts.

Had some trouble starting the engine. Turns out there was some dirt in the needle of the carburator. Simply turning the needle a bit (5 ticks) open, starting the engine and returning the needle to its original position solved this issue (although it took me more than 30 minutes to figure it out).

No spectacular flight for this first time, just some hoovering in different directions. The second flight was a bit more entertaining: I rehearsed my stall-turns and tried some standard patterns, which was quite a challenge in these (cross)wind conditions.