Saturday, we built a bunch of sparrows. Six of them!
I'm a member at PumpingStation:One. http://pumpingstationone.org/ A .. large?.. hackerspace in Chicago. As members, we run little classes to do things that we think are fun. I love flying stuff, so.. I thought we should build some flying things.
So lets jump to the meat of it, I asked if people were interested, and I got a bunch of signups to build these:
A flock of Sparrows. Those four planes flew saturday. Not well.. but they flew. We built a total of six.
I had five people show up to build with me. The skill levels ranged from "what's an r/c plane" to "I've flown multicopters for years, but never anything with servos."
The class went well. There was a lot of "you can't screw up to badly" that had to be said... But that's often the case with first timers.
So.. I learned a lot too. First, is check your shipment of parts, to make sure everything is kosher. I ended up ordering six brushed ESCs. Thankfully, I had enough proper ESCs hanging around to sort that out.
Second, is not everyone immediately clicks into how a r/c plane controller works. So next time I'm going to bring a 4 channel coaxial heli so people can learn how to move the sticks without ~really~ crashing.
It seems that the dihedrial built into the sparrow isn't enough for r/c use. I used the guage per the video, but it took LOTS of rudder to get the thing to come back from a bank. I expect that I was using the guage wrong...
Finally, check the CG. "This thing balances great with a 1000mah 3s in the nose" shouldn't be taken for granted.
After the first few flights showed these things were deeply unstable, we found that with a 1000mah 3s in the nose, we had CG's basically at the back of the spar. ... whoops.
We brought home our bent birds, threw tape on the noses, and everyone was sent home with directions to get that CG forward.
I'm still calling this a success. Though, next time, I think I"m going to go with planes that have a wider acceptable CG range, and a conventional tail.
-Nero
I'm a member at PumpingStation:One. http://pumpingstationone.org/ A .. large?.. hackerspace in Chicago. As members, we run little classes to do things that we think are fun. I love flying stuff, so.. I thought we should build some flying things.
So lets jump to the meat of it, I asked if people were interested, and I got a bunch of signups to build these:
A flock of Sparrows. Those four planes flew saturday. Not well.. but they flew. We built a total of six.
I had five people show up to build with me. The skill levels ranged from "what's an r/c plane" to "I've flown multicopters for years, but never anything with servos."
The class went well. There was a lot of "you can't screw up to badly" that had to be said... But that's often the case with first timers.
So.. I learned a lot too. First, is check your shipment of parts, to make sure everything is kosher. I ended up ordering six brushed ESCs. Thankfully, I had enough proper ESCs hanging around to sort that out.
Second, is not everyone immediately clicks into how a r/c plane controller works. So next time I'm going to bring a 4 channel coaxial heli so people can learn how to move the sticks without ~really~ crashing.
It seems that the dihedrial built into the sparrow isn't enough for r/c use. I used the guage per the video, but it took LOTS of rudder to get the thing to come back from a bank. I expect that I was using the guage wrong...
Finally, check the CG. "This thing balances great with a 1000mah 3s in the nose" shouldn't be taken for granted.
After the first few flights showed these things were deeply unstable, we found that with a 1000mah 3s in the nose, we had CG's basically at the back of the spar. ... whoops. We brought home our bent birds, threw tape on the noses, and everyone was sent home with directions to get that CG forward.
I'm still calling this a success. Though, next time, I think I"m going to go with planes that have a wider acceptable CG range, and a conventional tail.
-Nero
