My long wanted helicopter has arrived and I have started the build. I was lucky to get this nice piece of machine for only $495 on ebay, orginal price is $689. Quite a deal.
Build images
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| Align T-rex 600 ESP |
Helicopter versus Woman
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.
Two days ago, I managed to get my hands on 800×1200x6mm depron sheets locally. I only had to pay 207NOK or $30, if you wish. These sheets are god for 3-4 planes. I almost got two planes in one sheet where the Raptor was cut in one piece.
Yesterday I received my package from readyheli where there was two receivers and four 11.1v 850mAh kongpower batteries I tend to use on these planes. More on my second plane in another post.
Specifications for this plane will be updated when I deside the electronics for it.
Specifications so far:
Build images below.
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| F-22 Raptor |
View maiden flight on youtube
Dave Powers has recently developed a system which saves your plane. It’s like a propsaver, but for the entire motor. Check out his test model and pictures at his site.
Process images from when I built my ST model - twin dragon indoor 3D plane:
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| Twin Dragon build |
I finally joined the tt-01 “group” by buying an R-version. I build it recently and really enjoyed the work.
There aren’t any electronics in the car yet, execpt for the motor. I’m planning on using my HBX-ESC from my HBX bonzer car, which by the way is soon up and running again. Managed to find the gears I had broken. Anyways, an spektrum receiver combinding with my dx7 will be in this car aswell and going to steal an old servo I have in my Kyosho tracker 2.
I didn’t have any camera during the build, therefor I do not have any pictures of it either.
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| tt01 |
After an ugly crash with my T-rex 450 I managed to strip an Hitec 65MG (as in metal gear) for the first time. It was a new milestone for me. I was going to order a new set of gears from Elefun, but they were out of stock. I contacted them and was told the distributor was out of stock. It could take weeks before I could have the bird back in the air. Something I didn’t want to risk before the next indoor RC meeting.
It all boils down to my order over the seas which just arrived. Let’s take a look, shall we?
The box should contain:
I had some minor problems with my new T-rex 450 SE v2, the belt kept jumping off. I solved it by removing the idle-pulley, but now have I bought a replacement for it which looks to do the job.
Three servos for my old t-rex 450, one tail servo and two for cyclic. Also added servo grease for the servo I will be changing gear on.
The transmitter (later refereed as TX) battery, 2200mAh 11.1v Kong Power battery. I’ve read about someone running theirs for 5 weeks without charging. I guess mine won’t last that long since I use my TX on the simulator as well.
Almost forgot to add the charger and lipo. This is the best charger I have ever used. I might do a review of it some day.
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| Readyheli package |
I decided to start using wordpress as my blogging tool since I never finished my own tool. I have never used any other publishing tools besides my own. I’m quite satisfied with wordpress so far.
My next step will be to customize the theme for the blog and turn it into a more “complete” site of my style. My posts will mostly contain radio controlled (later called RC) related stuff. As RC being my main hobby and focus at the moment.
Over and out.
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