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Sunday, January 12, 2014

Ground Control Station


With the model aircraft hobby scaling beyond line of sight, control equipment also grows more complex and sophisticated these days. To the point where we no longer designate it of transmitter, but refer to it as "Ground Control Station".

Monday, December 30, 2013

Gathering with fellow pilots and Multicopter improvements


Most of the time I have been a lone rider in this hobby, having started from scratch on my own, since the traditional helicopters back in 2009. I would occasionally go to local air fields and try to mix in with seasoned RC airplane and helicopter pilots. But the environment would not always be too friendly, with the fixed wing guys not enjoying much the flying grass cutters.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Going higher with the flyer


After very conservative steps with this model aviation hobby, I decided to get closer to the trends, and do some updates/improvements on my quadcopter while still being careful with the budget.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Powerwheels RC conversion


I soon noticed my 20 month daughter affinity to vehicles. I wanted to give her one where she could sit and enjoy the ride, but currently most powered vehicles for infants require they are able to reach the throttle pedal and properly handle the steering wheel. So I figured out the best way would be to go remote controlled. As I already had done previous projects involving RC gear, it would be piece of cake to turn a regular electric car into a large scale RC car where a small kid could sit inside.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Power Supply Refactoring - finishing the details


In spite of already being a working device, there were aspects that like I explained in the previous post, required some attention. One of the major fixes was the voltage drift. This was caused by the 5 K potentiometer used to set the voltage end point. It was too large (the sweet spot of my setup was around 500 Ohms), which besides making it difficult to adjust, caused temperature induced resistance drift to be too large, causing an increase of around 200 mV from the initial voltage once the temperature settled.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Power Supply Refactoring - closing the hood

After many hours of work I finally can say it's done. Even though I don't consider it the perfect work, I can definitively consider it a major improvement in respect to the previous version of the PSU:

Before: