Contour HD, with battle damage

The Contour HD snuck up on me.  I was an early adopter of the Gopro Hero HD, and I was busy flying and making movies, not reading gadget sites.

I have been hoping for some time that we’d see a light, flash based HD camera with a slimmer form factor.  The Gopro HD Hero is great, but it presents a lot of frontal area.

The Contour lays flat, and it also has an innovative three position lens that allows you to shoot right side up from the get-go.  The Gopro handles this in software, but the firmware that supported that feature was painfully slow to emerge.

The Contour is also easier to use, in my opinion.  There is one power button on the back (it takes surprisingly long to boot up), and then a huge slide switch to start or stop recording.

The camera records to microSD (up to 32g, which is good for 8 hours), and connects to the computer via a mini USB cable.  The camera presents itself to Windows as a disk drive, no specialized drivers to install.  I really like devices that are set up this way, as a matter of fact I’ve never installed the software that comes with the camera.

I’m not as excited about the slide rail mounting system.  It does not feel as positive or high-quality as the Gopro setup.    The profile mount accessory is probably the most useful for R/C, but at $20 a pair, Contour mounts are a lot more expensive per airplane than Gopro’s mount.  *Note – Sometimes, various shopping sites will list the left vs. right side profile mount as cheap as $13/pair.

We had no problems in operation.  The dual laser pointers are useful for aiming, we basically just strapped it on and went.  On the second flight, I decided to mount it on the belly of a Great Planes Siren.

I really like the narrower 135 degree viewing angle vs. the Gopro’s 170 degrees. The color is slightly better than my new Gopro, and miles ahead of the first, early production Gopro we purchased.

In what was designed to be a much more relaxing video, here’s a fim taken from my 3.1m Topmodels.cz Grafas. I say ‘supposed to be’ because in this film, the radio system had a failure, and the airplane ended up spiraling in on failsafe, and hitting the ground HARD.

The camera shows some physical scars from this incident, but tested just fine after this crash.  If that was not bad enough, we dumped the Contour _again_, the following weekend – Mike was flying an MPX Easy Glider Pro and had an elevator servo foul.  He chopped the throttle late, the prop folded exactly 2 frames before impact!

We are _not_ a crash club, but if we were, the Coutour would still serve us well.

We shot all of those videos back in June.  I was in Southern Oregon mid July, and I took a flight around Crater Lake with an MPX Cularis, sporting the Contour up top.

The camera did a wonderful job, and even conveyed the unique blue you see at Crater Lake.   On a sailplane the size of the Cularis, you don’t even notice that the camera is there.

I weighed my contour at 4.3 ounces with the battery and SD card installed.  The waterproof case for the Contour adds about 4.7 ounces to the overall weight, which would have it coming in around 9 ounces with the case on.  This is a couple more than the Gopro, but remember that the Gopro has no natural protection unless the case is installed, so it always weighs 6.3 ounces no matter what.

I’ve interacted with Contour as a company twice, and Gopro a few times.   I can say that Contour is a heckuva lot more accessible, and they also provide telephone technical support.  Gopro support is email only, which can be limiting.

In summary, I think the Contour is a great camera for R/C use, and has some distinct advantages over the older Gopro.  In specific, I’m very excited by the rapid development of new products and accessories for the camera.

Helicopters are still fairly new to me.  I used to be one of those guys that tended to bad-mouth the complexity, bench time and heartache that I had always associated with ‘fling wings’, and I swore I’d never get into that aspect of the hobby.

The mCX was my ‘gateway drug’ into helicopters.  That plucky little thing is one of the few RC experiences you can still enjoy with success, even after having a few beers.  I loved that thing, and flew it every day for a long time.

I bought an mSR a few months later, and immediately had buyer’s remorse.  The mSR was way too ‘fast and agile’ for my skills at the time, and it sat idle for a while.  I finally started using Realflight that year, and started flying some helis in the sim.

This simulator time, plus some real stick time on a friend’s TT ‘Innovator’ set the hook further regarding helis.  I purchased a nice E-flite Blade 400 3D pnp a few months later, and I’ve put about 20 hours on that bird since I purchased it.  Nearly all of my time with the B400 was spent in hover practice, generally with the tail boom pointed firmly towards me. 

I got to the point that I could routinely fly the B400, no crashing or drama, but I was not having much fun, anymore.  Hovering is an intensive mental exercise, but it only goes so far.  I realized that I wanted to ‘fly a helicopter’ around without having to worry about every little thing.

I rediscovered the mSR, and started getting my money’s worth out of it.   I had just started doing some nose-in exercises with it, when the 120 showed up at my LHS.

Dennis allowed me to fly one of the first 120′s that showed up in his shop.  It felt like a much larger helicopter, and I was immediately impressed by how nicely it flew, brushed motors and all.  I just recently gave away an original CP, and I know how bad some inexpensive electric helis can be.

Dennis says that combining a collective pitch main rotor and a fixed pitch tail rotor is not usually a good combination, no matter how you slice it.  However, a fixed/fixed pitch config seems to work out well, as evidenced by the fine handling of the mSR and the 120.  Note that the $200 SR (which looks like a larger version of the mSR) is set up with a collective pitch main rotor and a fixed pitch tail.  The SR is reputed to fly just about as well (or as poorly) as the original CP, albeit with a brushless motor, and of course it depends heavily on who you are talking to.

The best thing about the 120 is its crash resistance.  If you get out of the left stick before a serious crash (or even if you don’t), you can just bounce off an obstacle, and start flying again without even having to re-arm the gyro.  The carbon fiber main shaft means that it never bends, unless you really over-do it in which case it breaks, and you replace it for a few bucks.  The 120 is also amazingly wind-resistant for its size.  Replacement parts are dirt cheap and rarely required.

Brilliant engineering.  Other high points are the 6:30 flight time you get from a pack, and the sub $12 cost of a spare flight battery.  Lots of packs means lots of flying, and lots of practice, which is what the 120 is all about, right?

Since I started writing this article, I’ve started doing some 3D stuff in the simulator and also in real life with my Blade 400.  I would never have had the courage to try some of this or really get into flying heli’s if I had not had a willing, cheap, damage resistant little craft like the 120 around.

In short,  I think the 120SR is a great way for an intermediate pilot transition from indoor coax heli’s to more advanced models without spending a lot of money doing so.

I really appreciate good value in hobby products, and my “grin per dollar” value has stayed very high with the 120.  I feel good recommending it to anybody.

I’m going to keep practicing until I can fly ‘nose in’ _consistently_ without losing the plot at inconvienient times.  This may take a few months!

- Eli

Over the last year, I’ve been looking at a lot of 3D/Sport ships in the 45-55″ range.    The PA Extra MX really attracted me at first, I loved the idea that I could just use commodity 3s 2200 batteries and enjoy high-dollar 6S performance.  For 3 minutes... 

I also looked at the 50″ Matt Chapman Eagle 580.  That’s one nice looking airplane, and the reviews were glowing.  I flew it on the sim for a few weeks, started looking at powerplant options, and that’s when my past experience with the whole Electrifly reality kicked in.  I remembered the specialized motor mounts and weird proprietary stuff associated with my last Electrifly ARF, and decided to wait a while until somebody had documented a good motor conversion. 

I wasn’t looking that hard, or thinking about this very much at all when I wandered over to my LHS one afternoon for some fasteners.  Lo and behold, one the shelf was the brand new E-Flite Extra I had heard about from SEFF press.  Great looking kit, perfect wingspan, and I started to notice things: Fully built up airfoil on the horizontal stab and rudder.   No externally visible cowl screws.  Cockpit latch.  High quality wheel pants included.  Decent hardware, from the factory, including a nice looking pull/pull setup!  

I had been a little bit disappionted with some of the details in previous E-Flite kits, and the Extra looked like it had raised the mark.  The hook was set. 

Over the next 48 hours, I realized that I had a brand new Power 32 in stock, a Turnigy Plush 60, an AR6200 and even a CC/BEC sitting new in inventory.  This made the purchase even more attractive, $199 for the ARF less my LHS club discount, 4 servos, and I was off to the races. 

A few days later, I purchased the ARF and 4 HS-225MG servos.  E-Flite says you can get by on MN48′s, but the Hitec servos are a good deal, and JR does not have an analog Hi-Torque servo anywhere close to the price range.  It was perfect, a low cash outlay for a lot of airplane, even more so for me due to the fact that I had so many useful parts already stashed. 

When I started the build, the quality of the kit blew my mind.  E-Flite has always made nice ARF’s, but this was a step above.  Right off the bat, I decided to slow down and have some fun with the linkage.  E-Flite was already using nice aluminum control horns, and I decided to eliminate as much nylon as I could from some of those linkages.  

Enter Central Hobbies, and the Dubro catalog.  Central Hobbies does some wonderful pushrod hardware, designed for much larger aircraft.  I used the small stuff in their line, some 2-56 titanium ends and the recommended CF rod.  You cut the CF to size, and JB weld or epoxy the ends in.  A steel clevis is used on one end, and a 2-56 Dubro ball link at the servo end. The finished product is a threadable, adjustable link that is extremely light, strong, and attractive to look at. 

The rudder linkage was a joy.  I like pull-pull setups, and the only modification I made was to use metal clevis parts instead of the supplied nylon ones.  I used the same Dubro threaded clevis and std 2-56 pushrod on the ailerons, it’s a short rod and plenty strong that way. 

Mounting the motor was straightforward, and I loved the adjustable motor mount.  No matter what motor you want to put on your Extra, you can probably bolt it right up without worries.
I was using the Power 32, but I had another little problem.  The recommended 2.25″ E-Flite aluminum spinner was on pan-Galactic backorder at the time, with a long lead time.  I happened to have a nice ‘Ultimate’ spinner in the right size, but it didn’t have enough plunge to engage the motor shaft.  I used some nuts that were a little over 1/4″ tall to space out the motor, and all was well. 

Ultimate Spinner on Extra 32e

When it came time to set up the electronics, I decided to use a tried and true Turnigy Plush 60, powered by a Rhino 3700 4S battery.  I also incorporated a Castle CC/BEC to power the electronics, because I wanted to drive the servos at 6 volts.  I used a Spektrum AR6200 RX, and also incorporated the SPM1600 capacitor.  I probably don’t have any real reason for using these, especially with a quality seperate BEC installed, but I used it anyway.

I closed up the canopy on my trimmed down Hangar 9 pilot that night, after a getting a preliminary idea on CG, and radio setup.  As I mounted the balanced 13×6.5 APC prop, I could not wait for morning to arrive.  It came up to 4.1lbs all up.

The maiden flight was splendidly uneventful.  The ground handling is great, and the big power 32 rolled it into the air with authority at 50% throttle with minimal rudder correction.  I had to give it one click of up trim, and that was that.  I flew it around for a few minutes (half of the expected 7+ minutes) and brought it in for a nice slow powered approach.  I find nice three point landings particularly easy and rewarding with this airplane.

In subsequent flights, I moved the CG a little further back from the recommended for better hovering, swapped out the prop for a PA Vox 14×7 (sounds and flies great!), and tuned the throws to my personal liking. 

I really like this airplane.  I’ve been taking it out every time I go flying, and I have fun flying it slow, fast, and some 3D within the limits of my skill and bravery.  I think it’s one of the best behaved model airplanes I’ve ever flown, and I’d highly recommend it to anybody looking for an economical, versatile sport ship. 

Full build gallery here.

- Eli

On Sunday 9/5/2010, the Wine Country Flyers hosted a float fly at local Sal Lake up in Healdsburg.  A nice low key event, and a great opportunity for me to try out my Ultra 25e on water.

Setting up and installing the E-Flite fiberglass float kit was pretty easy.  The literature claims that you can go ‘from park to pond in just minutes’, which I’d say was accurate if you add an hour or two the first time, and 30-45 minutes of fiddling for subsequent transitions.

One benefit of using all the E-Flite recommended gear is that the CG was just perfect with no modifications required.  When we got out to the lake, the ‘ground’ handling was good, with a LOT of water rudder authority.  I was flying 4s, so R.O.W. was really easy to achieve off the still pond.

The Ultra is still very aerobatic with all that weight down there.   With a 4S 4900 on board and the GoPro, our AUW was 5.5lbs and the plane still felt nimble.

I was really nervous about landing.  I’ve seen a million videos of people nosing over and getting their stuff soaked.

This turned out to be an unfounded fear.  As long as you keep track of the plane’s shadow on the water, you can judge distance fairly well.  My landings ranged from fair to acceptable, and I called that a success.  

I shot a lot of video that day, but the most fun was the one we shot when Red Jensen was flying the plane:

I ended up flying 3 times, and had more packs ready to go when my RX started glitching.  Turns out, it’s a good idea to treat your electronics with a product called Corrosion X_before_ you hit the shores.  I lucked out in three respects- First, my RX glitched on the ground and not in flight.  Next, Andrew from the Liberty Flyers had some Corrosion X in his toolbox, and lastly, my R790 JR RX tests just fine now that it’s been treated

We’re looking forward to future trips out to the lake.  Special thanks to the Wine Country Flyers for putting on the event!

 I stopped by my LHS the other day, and was delighted to see that Dennis had one of the Wildcat ‘Airframe Only’ kits in stock.  It was only $79.99, and building my Mustang was so much fun that I just could not resist. 

I used the typical electronics shopping list:  Turnigy 3536C-1100, Turnigy Plush 40, Rhino 1350 30C lipo, Master Airscrew 10×8 prop, and 4 HXT900 micro servos.  I decided to fly it FM, mostly because I can buy nice R790 receivers for cheap on Ebay, and I had one on hand.

The next thing I did was get ahold of Gary at CustomRC to see if he had plans to do an aluminum mount for the Wildcat.  He does plan to make one, but since the plane is brand new it was going to take a few weeks before he was ready to ship one out.  I knew I wanted to use the same Turnigy 3536-1100kv motor I had used in the Mustang, so, I decided to make up a little mount adapter to compensate for the fact that the Turnigy is shorter than the stock PZ 480.  I used some .125″ aluminum plate (measured  3.14mm) and some 1/2″ aluminum standoffs.  I’m not that great at layout, but I got the job done.  Thank God for the drill press.

This is a really cool foamy.  The thing is loaded with neat features, like a rigid battery box that will take 1300 or 2100 batteries.  It has a fiberglass wing tube that fits into molded plastic bits in the wings and fuse.  The horizontal stab has a carbon fiber rod that runs through it, and a very cool interlocking setup that joins the stab halves and keeps them perfectly straight.  The servo pockets fit the Hobbycity HXT-900 servos I planned to use, complete with nice wire exits molded in.  There are even little molded grooves in the receiver pocket so that the whiskers of a DSM2 receiver will lay down gracefully.  All in all, PZ is continuing to evolve the foamy, and that evolution makes these stronger and easier to build with every release.

The Wildcat flies great.  It’s a little smaller than the BL mustang or the T-28, a little faster, and the wing tube pretty much eliminates wing flex even with the hopped up motor.  I used a 15% rudder to Aile mix in my X9303, 25-30% expo across the board, and I tend to fly it on high rates all the time.  The axial roll rate is snappy, it turns nicely, and gains altitude like who would not have it.  It’s also remarkably balanced, and flies inverted very nicely.

I got about 5 minutes with throttle management out of a Rhino 1350, and I highly recommend using 30C batteries if you intend to go full throttle.  I have not tried flying it with an 1850 yet, mostly because the CG is dead on with the smaller battery and I wanted to try flying it light, first.

So, when I add up what I spent, it comes to $202.30, not including any sales tax or shipping.  Shipping from Hobbycity can be significant, especially on motors and batteries, so be aware.   Also, that figure includes an inexpensive Ebay JR SPCM receiver.  If I had used an AR500, I’d be at $225 before tax.  If you were to buy the Wildcat from Horizon as a BNF, you’d get all this stuff plus a cheapie charger for $189!

So, building with Turnigy and Rhino is not necessarily the cheapest way to go, but I definitely think you are getting a better airplane at the end of the day.  If nothing else, raising the top speed from 45 to 70+ mph is worth the extra bucks, and once CustomRC produces a mount, the job of assembly will be even easier.  Building a foamy yourself over a couple of evenings is a lot of fun, as is the chance to decide what parts you would like to use.

Full build gallery here.

- Eli

My Squall, post 3 flights/1 minor incident

I have been thinking about one of these for a long time, and when Hobbypeople dropped the price a few bucks on the complete setup including vectored thrust, I jumped.

I built the kit using trusty old HXT-900 servos, and the build was mostly unremarkable.  The ARF and associated parts are all of good quality, and the manual is written in a way that I found easy to understand and use.  We used Rhino 2250 4S batteries, but you could probably use anything – the battery tray is wide, long, and accomodating.

Cutting out the decals is about as labor-intensive as building the kit, but there is good news – The provided decals look awesome, and provide needed orientation when in the air.

This is a very interesting airplane to fly.  If you just throw and go, that’s exactly what you get, and we clocked it at 82mph in straight and level flight.  It looks good, feels good, and slows down just fine for landing. 

If you decide to set your TX for high rates, and start slowing down and using them, you can do things like hover, flat spins, and all sorts of other stuff that I’m not really skilled enough to be doing at this stage of the game.  At one point, I got a little low after some of this, and had a low-speed impact with the field – this foam breaks cleanly and repairs cleanly.

As long as you keep it on low rates, this airplane is really quite easy to fly.  If you decide to start mucking around with low speed maneuvers using the vectored thrust, just remember to stay up at altitude and use power as your salvation if you get into trouble.  Flying an EDF like a 3D airplane is weird, and they do not recover from 3D space back to flying as gracefully as the prop jobs do. 

More news as my skills improve,

- Eli