Meatball Racing

Radio Control Blog

Flite Fest Ohio 2018

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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

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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 a 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.

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I’m in Le Drib’s vlog!

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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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Converting to XT60

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I did quite a bit more flying this summer than I did rc car racing. As the weather turns cold flying will be limited to golf dome outings with the local electric club and indoor FPV. In Minnesota the on-road guys drive on carpet indoors, so it’ll soon be time to race. One thing I’ve grown to like that is commonplace on quads and planes is the XT-60 connector. So I decided to upgrade all of my cars and even my rocket launcher to it.

Technically, an XT-60 pair is 2g heavier than a pair of Deans connectors, but with all of the other advantages, I’m still switching.
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Eachine DVR

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Let me start by saying that the Eachine EV100 DVR (made for the EV100 FPV goggles) is cheaper and almost certainly works with other goggles. It can be powered directly by a 2S battery, which is commonplace for FPV goggles.

It is the add-on DVR I would buy today for only $15 if I hadn’t already purchased the Eachine ProDVR.

Stu (Stew?) confirms that the EV100 DVR is A-OK.

But if you’re like me and have the ProDVR read on. [Read more…]