[secant0give]

Well it flies !!

I managed to get in a test flight today despite the weather and some small technical problems.

Problem no 1 was I'd set the model up with wing mixing and tested it all then taken the receiver out and foolishly mixed up the servo's leads in putting it back. Fortunately I did check the throws before flying and discovered something was wrong. But this meant a bit of surgery to extract the receiver to swap the leads back to their rightful places.

Problem no 2: All the time the camera was working fine good picture and nice. Then suddenly the camera died and there was only the data from the OSD on a black background and no picture ???? I wasn't going to fly it FPV for this first flight but it would have been nice to have the video recorded just the same. It was not to be. So it was decided to test fly it and see how the air frame would go.

In hind sight it might have been interesting to just record the OSD data but I didn't think of that at the time. I just turned off the ground station and went to the bungee.

Now I have bungee launched gliders before, it was years ago and from a high start bungee not a set up like this for launching EDF machines.

Darren, enthusiastically assured me that it would launch from this bungee no probs, as long as I didn't power up until the to cord had dropped away, commented that "this could be interesting" and offered wholeheartedly to give me hand!! I had some concerns about it being a pusher and it was agreed that things would defiantly go badly if the prop tangled up with the tow line.

Well next the thing I know bungee was stretched the mechanism was armed and my new wing was resting on the launch rails with Darrens foot hovering over the release peddle.

"Fire!!" I yelled and it was away!! Much much faster than I expected, I guess it had well cleared the tow cord when I bent the throttle against it's stop and pulled back on the elevator stick and simultaneously gave a large helping of aileron to counter a rapid roll to the left, I think it was to the left, It all happened at once. Then up it shot into the gray and windy sky. OK got some height now hmmmm but it's badly trimmed need heaps of elevator to hold it level and quite a bit of aileron too. Then I remembered Darren saying "I'll give you hand" he was a just couple of steps away and watching the model intently. I asked him to give me a couple of clicks of elevator trim while I fought the sticks and I'm super glad he did. "Thanks Darren !!" onve elevator was trimmed I got ailerons sorted and began to shake a little less and enjoy a flight of what must have been nearly 10 mins. This model has over 4 Amp hours of battery so I wasn't in a hurry to bring it down. It flew fast and looked smooth once trimmed and I hammered it around in the lumpy air for a while. I guess it was blowing about 15 knots. After a while I did slow it up a bit with out any nasty surprises it stalled nicely and just nodded it's nose. Memories of slope soaring these wings were starting to come back to me now and I was really enjoying flying this wing again. I still wanted to see how it would handle a tight turn with all this extra weight so I got it up to some pace banked it over and gave it some serious and sudden elevator. It just seemed to hook around the corner like it was on rails just like I remembered. Then I tried it again this time with a little extra pace from a shallow dive on full noise, bank and then suddenly full elevator, It almost did it the wing rolled slightly out of the tight turn but I guess I can forgive it as it's carrying two 2200 3S lipos a 42-40 motor and an 85A ESC plus FPV gear and extra reinforcing to take the extra load. I reckon it's the best part of a Kilogram heavier than it was as a slope soarer. All that was left to do was a couple of practice approaches to get a feel for the sink rate. Landing was a nonevent with power off I just lined it up with the strip and held it off 'till it dropped on.

I'm super happy with the first flight despite the camera dying. After I got home and did some domestic chores I took the camera off and pulled it apart for an Autopsy. There were a couple of damaged components on the board. One that was cracked I could still make out a component number on. 6206A Mind you this was one of the bigger components on this tiny surface mount board it had obviously cracked to let the smoke out and there was another similar sized component same package but cracked and burned so badly I couldn't make out the numbers on it. So being a bit curious I goggled the numbers and found a data sheet for a KB6206

"The KB6206 series are precise, low power consumption, high
voltage, positive voltage regulators manufactured using
CMOS and laser trimming technologies. The series provides
large currents with a significantly small dropout voltage."

Now I'm surmising, with my limited knowledge of electronics, that this might be the camera's on board voltage regulator and Strangely enough when you look at the data sheet I googled it says it's max input voltage is 9 volts. The instructions that came with the camera said it would run between happily 6 and 12 volts and I was supplying it with about 9.5 volts. Hmmmmm bugger

Here's a link to the data sheet the component matches the package type 100% and even has the 33 underneath and to the right to denote 3.3v output. http://www.datasheetarchive.com/Indexer/...73637.html

Any way I'm a little annoyed that now I've let the smoke out of 2 camera's I have another one I might try to set up on it during the week.

Here's a apic of the finished plane minus dead camera

   

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