The manual for this ESC is pretty bad, but do we really care when the product is cheap and has nice features?
This ESC has simliar features as the aquastar ESC Turnigy produces. I used aquastar`s manual and managed to produce a programming sequence chart for super brain ESC.
Here is another project with it`s story for you.
I`we flown RC helicopters for around three years now and only electric. We all know batteries tend to get worn out, which is what who has happened to many of my batteries. They don`t have the same punch as they had, which is essential for good 3D flying. Even tho they are bad for 3D they can still be used for low-amps applications, such as scale flying.
Therefore I`we decided to get myself an scale body for one of my Align T-rex 450 helis, the oldest in fact. At first I bought a Airwolf body, but I didn`t really want an Airwolf and it did miss the tail with retracts. Comanche on the other hand has always impressed me, being «the best» helicopter around with a very long development period.
The build process started by figuring out what scale the heli would become for a T-rex 450. If I recall correctly the 450 has a blade with of 70cm and RAH-66 has 11,9meters. This results in a scale of 1:17. From here I calculate 1:17 length of 13.20m (without gun barrel).
There are very few good pictures of this helicopter from all angles on the internet, but I were able to calculate the tail to be tilted 15 degrees. I also had to do allot of testing of bottom plate and the lower sides to make it scale looking. After the bottom was finish I used a paper-piece and draw the upper body. After I cutting the paper piece out it was easy to make a similar in 6mm depron.
Update #1
Retracts and penta head installed, but the retracts were only made for the heli and battery weight. When adding five blades to the head the retracts failed under take off. When I saw the heli was about to come to one side I accelerated it to prevent blades for hitting the ground. My attempt failed and the comanche body were damaged.
After this failure I had three things to straiten up before the fuselage was perfect.
I have now thrown away (in the trash) the heli and will not build another one. Not this season at least.
Images
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| Comanche RAH-66 |
First video
As little I made RC boats from scratch and since my knowledge about air vehicles is bigger I just had to build another “boat” when I came accross L‘Hydro-Foam. This “boat” has the same abilities as the ship in the Norwegian folk tale Askeladden, “Et skip som går like godt i lufta som til lands og til vanns”.
As usually I printed the PDF available on the French site and cut depron in given shapes.
Check out my gallery for build pictures
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| Hydrofoam build |
Maiden flight on youtube
Unbelievable plane build and it`s movie
Sound technology, listen to nearby planes pretty cool idea
So I decided to make something with RC-servos using the Arduino board and the sensor shield which I recently purchased.
I went ahead figuring out how to send arrow signals from my computer to Arduino using USB interface.
Using void setup() { Serial.begin(9600); } on Arduino and screen /dev/ttyUSB0 9600 on my computer, I managed to send commands back and forth. I hooked up the standard servo library and write some code before I mounted the Arduino board on my mini rock crawler. I now had a computer controlled car. Because of Arduino`s simple interface I had it all up and running around an hour. Check the small video and code below.
You can view and or use the code as you like below. (Sorry about the indention, WordPress messes it up).
//
// OBJ
//
Servo servo1;
Servo servo2;
// VARS
int readByte;
int servo1Angle = 90; //default servo angle
int servo2Angle = 90;
int minPulse = 700; // minimum servo position
int maxPulse = 2300; // maximum servo position
void setup()
{
servo1.attach(2, minPulse, maxPulse); //connect servo
servo2.attach(3, minPulse, maxPulse);
Serial.begin(9600); // start serial
Serial.println(“Ready\n”);
}
void loop()
{
if (Serial.available() > 1) // procced when two bytes is avaiable
{
readByte; = Serial.read(); //read first byte
if (readByte; == 91)
{
readByte; = Serial.read(); //read second byte to determine arrow type
if (readByte; == 65 && servo1Angle <= 180) //UP
{
servo1Angle += 5;
}
else if(readByte; == 66 && servo1Angle >= 0) //DOWN
{
servo1Angle -= 5;
}
else if(readByte; == 67 && servo2Angle <= 180) //RIGHT
{
servo2Angle += 5;
}
else if(readByte; == 68 && servo2Angle >= 0) //LEFT
{
servo2Angle -= 5;
}
}
}
// set servo positions
servo1.write(servo1Angle);
servo2.write(servo2Angle);
delay(15);
}
After running this motor to hard outside, I managed to burn the motor. You can see pictures of the “burnt” motor in the gallery below.
First of all I opened the motor to take a look noticing protective isolation layer on the copper were melted. Not so strange, because when I approaced the motor after the plane fell from the sky, it was insane hot.
Before removing all wire I measured the wire diameter to 0,30mm. I found this king of wire inside very small tranformators in a computer power supply.
By using this picutre, found on this page. I was able to re wound the motor.
I actually did wound all the poles at the same time, well, one by one, but all three wires were in use, if you follow.
After finish wounding I had to connect wires together to make only three wires, brushless motor has three out wires.
Since it`s a pretty fast motor I made a delta hookup, but I did a mistake at first. This motor should have around 195mOhm per 14-turn, maybe I did not mention it is a 14-turn motor. Which means each pole (there are nine here) needs 14 turns of isolated copper wire and in a small motor like this one, it`s not that easy. Anyway, by hooking up wrong end`s I broke a ESC of mine ($10) so I had to buy another one.
The motor works just great now and I might add a video later.
Gallery
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| Fixing brushless motor |
An interesting link were floating around on IRC today, containing a video showing devices being powered wireless. Take a look.
We`re about to choose a new project at school, maybe this is a step up from our mechanical hand?
After my last to planes I still had some depron left. I decided to build myself another plane instead of throwing it away or keeping it for repair scrap.
I had already came across a free pdf version of F-117 and the choice were easy. After transforming the pdf manual into paper with a little printer help, I realised the plane were to advanced. Which is not really necessary in my opinion. This resulted in what I would call a 50/50 build. I started the nose as it should be, but shorted the back down quite allot. I ended up only using the paper as line-up before adapting the pieces were I wanted them, using eye sight.
You can view my build steps here
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| F-117 Nighthawk |
This plane is retired because of last crash due to it`s bad aerodynamic flight capabilities.
Ok, I’ve been wanting a new body for my touring car for a while. I’ve been running Tamiya’s Raybrig body since I first bought the TA05IFS, but didn’t use enough time to make it cool and neither did I have RC-lights.
I wanted Ford GT500 body, but it didn’t/don’t exists and I didn’t want to create one from the scratch either. My best choice then was HPI’s GT-R.
I always cut the body first, drill holes and grind uneven areas with sandpaper. Front was cuttet to be able to have a grind in front, made holes for lower light’s and added stickers both front and back for disguising lights.
Step one in painting was black.
Doing a new disguising for middle part, to make inside a bit cleaner. Due to holes in the front, I was unlucky with disguising the front and had some leaks. Damn leaks.
From distance the car turned out great! If we look closer we can see all the leaks I had because of bad, bad tape. Next step was to darken the windows, but I was stupid enough to remove the lexan cover before doing so and I had to create me a new one.
To disguise back lights I used stickers shipped with the car. I cut them the way I wanted and it did fit like I wanted. I now had to use it’s shape to create a light bucket. For making light buckets I find it best to make it in paper first, it’s cheap, easy to use and environment friendly. You can see on left image below how I got the first shape to start with then I just added 0,5cm etc. for what I thought would be enough.
Being a perfectionist and all, I had to do this a couple of times before I was satisfied.
When it finally fit, I unfolded the paper again and taped it to 0.10mm thick metal I used and cut it out.
Front light’s are basically the same, but I had to cut my shape in half since i were going to put a cone in there.
Putting the pieces together was a hell because it the pieces didn’t have any areas to connect togheter, the only thing was the cone and it was going in after they were connected.
Mounting the lights with double sided tape.
GT500 knight rider has read light in the front. This car don’t have the same opening at front, so I had to improvise and make a crack another place. I also tried with underglow, but it didn’t look good enough.
I used a simple 6,0V light system to start with on this car, but I had to modify it allot since I were going to use 13 LEDs and not 6. I wanted to power this system directly from driving battery which is a 3S lipo battery, this means 9-12.6v. To be able to use such high voltage on light system, I had to put int resistors. To calculate resistors for each parallel connected resistor I used the formula Vr = (V-Vwanted)/I.
If you want to view all the images for this project feel free to browse my gallery below.
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| Ford GT-R – Knight rider edition |
This article will have an overview of our school project (term 2/6). There are three heads on my group. Our goal with this project is to make a mechanical hand which can move it fingers like a real human hand, electronically controlled. Even point at, pick and crush things!
Before we decided what project we wanted to do, we had several ideas. A sensor based 4wd vehicle to mention one of them. After setting our goal on making a mechanical hand we did our research on google search/images. We only found a single hand (image below) which seemed something we could do in our time, among many other professional vendors.
It is required by us to setup a budget and plans for the rest of the project. All groups in my class needs to be finish by week 21 when the presentation is.
Me and my group are finish developing the hand and making it. We also got our plans for each week ready. Luckily, we reached our milestone for this week, were we wanted to figure out signal’s need for the RC-servos.
The hand is going to be drifted with five Futaba 148S servos, they cost about $19 each and provide 4.1KG of torque with 6.0v and a twist time of 0.19sec/60 degrees. So far, our budget is on $94, but it may increase by a few bucks due to some small components we might need.
We are still working on the sinew/rod’s before installing servos. We might just clean it for all welding points as well.
Update #1
We have now figured out the servo signals and created a physical servo controller. We are using the 555 timer, two actually, because we had an issue with only using one. It didn’t create a stable output before 30 seconds after start. The
surrounding components, capacitors and resistors are our variables, changing the signal length.
We also did make a counter using two J/K FlipFlops and a dmux to convert the signals.
The circuit’s for this hand is so complex, that we decided to program it all into a Altera card. Logic scheme will be available later when we have completed the project.
Image album.
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| School project – Mechanical hand |
Video of hand in action.
Finger control.
Bottle holder.
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