eric's model flying blog

Rebuilding my Durafly Tundra took longer than expected, and the result was not good enough. So my plan was to do things right, this time around, and get new parts wherever needed. That ended up in me buying a new Tundra all over again...

This weekend, I lost my FPV virginity! Nothing fancy, just a quick tour around a tree or two, with about 100 meters in between them. But it wasn't about racing, freestyling, or other fancy moves. This was all about getting in the air, moving around a bit, and getting back on the ground in a condition that another flight could be undertaken with the same aircraft. Preferably without too much repairs 😉 Pre-Flight foto, just in case (I learned to do that, the hard way...) By now, the 4S battery I had ordered was in. This not only added 3.7V to the nominal voltage, bringing it up to 14.8, but also knocked off 60 grams off of the weight. That should mean a whole lot of extra punch! It's a Turnigy 1300 mAh High Discharge (45C constant, 90C peak) version. Before doing anything, I wanted to do a range test with my transmitter / receiver combination. Since I had not used this combo before, I wanted to be sure I could get across the 300m of the longest side of the...

As I wrote before, so far i've ordered everything I used from Chinese web vendors. The argument initially being the price, of course. I did not want to invest too much in a project with an unsure outcome, if that's not necessary. And in my case, there were many possible negative scenarios, making this a sort of high risk project. I did not know if I could pull it off, software-wise. I had some confidence in me getting the mechanical part sorted out. But then, if those two would come together, I did not even know if i could fly at all, or if I would like to fly such an apparatus. Or if I would continue to like it, once the challenge of getting things to work would wear off. But since my experiences with those Chinese vendors was positive all around, I continued to order from there to this very date. I have only once not received an order (out of some 200 orders), and that was settled with a refund after only two messages. Also, I received something different than I thought I...