Twinstar with Landing gear

Here I tried out my custom landing gear. It weights about 150g wich can be a CoG issue. If mounted too far in the forward section - noose-heavy flight; too far backwards and you'll see yourself rubbing your plane's nose in the grass :-)

A thrid wheel would be a possible solution - but that also means additional weight. To small would make a hook of it...

For takeoff it helped giving some extra elevator; takeoff distance is quite short for grass (5-7m?).


Twinstar with Landing gear from Mario Schimanko on Vimeo.

Technical specs:
Motors: 2x MPX Permax 480 7,2v
Props: Graupner CamSpeed 5,5/4,3
Battery: Lipo 3s Kokam 2400H5 (30c)
ESC: Jeti 30+

My conclusion: nice optics, cool feeling on the start, diffcult landings (material consuming), not safe for FPV so far - no extra benefit - I'll stay without wheels for FPV.

PS: did you recognize the music?
It's from this Spencer/Hill movie "Plane cracy" / "Zwei Himmelhunde auf dem Weg zur Hölle"

Twinstar FPV: Huyck-Field

This were a few great rounds above my hometown - above the company I work in to be exact.
I did two flights but on one the jaytech stopped recording (no guess why) - so only one landing.

Twinstar FPV: Huyck-Field from Mario Schimanko on Vimeo.
If you look close you can see the oakmountain-field (behind the castle) and down the city you see the big white building again (chockolate factory with my airfield behind).

Oakmountain flight (external Cam)

I wanted to show some extra material beautifully captured by my girlfriend. You'll also get to see some behind the scenes material :-)

Oakmountain flight (external) from Mario Schimanko on Vimeo.
Unconventional audience, great soundtrack and simply a great day "high above the mucky-muck".

Oakmountain FPV with great sunlight

Yesterday I had to FPV a few rounds over the "oakmountain" - the light was fantastic. This time you'll see footage from the JayModCam again, unfortunatly it was pointed up a bit to high...


Oakmountain FPV with great sunlight from Mario Schimanko on Vimeo.
(If you pause at 00:39 you can see a bright withe building in the background - this is the Lindt & Sprüngli Chocolate Factory and the "Airfield" from the lase vid!)

The mic was covered with foam this time (to prevent heavy noise) - so the air-speed-sound gives you an impression of the actual flyingspeed and motor usage.

I scaled to 640x360 to have smooth vid with 30fps (the old story). I'm still not satisfied with the tele of the jaytech - wide-angle would make a much better overview.

FPV Flight: Foggy Autumn evening

This was my third real FPV flight - and it was great.
Great conditions (only a bit foggy), no technical problems, huge airfield with plenty of space to land...


FPV: Foggy Autumn evening from Mario Schimanko on Vimeo.

Next I'm planning to go back to my JayModCam for recording - should give better quality (now I use a USB Framegrabber wich interlaces to vid - this makes it worse).
Video-Downlink quality is great for flying altough!

Stay tuned,
Greetings,
http://RCSchim.blogspot.com

Gloggnitz viewed from the "Oakmountain"

Gloggnitz viewed from the "Oakmountain" from Mario Schimanko on Vimeo.

First of all - this vid has no real landing - rather a crash. I was lucky enough and my twinstar with its brand new cameramount was not damaged. I'm not really sure what happend - easiest explanation would be a bad piloting, a stall during the too hard and too low turn. It could also be that one of the motors had a failure - this wouldn't be that great. After the crash I could successfully test the plane.
Second problem (which is also visible):
the cam settings have to be improved. Maybe it's because of me using only 8,4v instead of the recommended 10-12v. I'll check this first.

Update: now I tried 12v (a small Kokam 3cell 310mah lipo) and the cam works fine - so don't use less than 10v - quality and automatic lighting will suffer from low voltage!
So this was no real FPV flying because you can see that the sunlight could really bother you with this settings.
-
Please choose your own music - I was too lazy :-)
Btw. the oakmountain is named "Eichberg" in german.

Twinstar2 - better Cameramount, slightly better Design

After a few tipps I tried this:
 

The cammount hast been bent back and than I tape-wrapped the two supports.
Perspective from there is great, but the ultra-wide angle is weird for FPV flying - I'll sty by the "normal" wideangle.

Twinstar - new FPV Camera mount

Now that I have a new, working FPV cam I made a new cameramount for it. Combined with a wide angle lense it will give me a cool perspective (video should hopefully follow shortly!):
 

I'm not sure how the "cameramount" will affect the aerodynamics - any comments?

Draganflyer Personal Helicopter

Info on Draganflyer Personal Helicopter
Apart from this heli costing a fortune this system looks very thoughtful!
Looks like the video goggles are integrated in the "normal" RC controller.



Thanks to Andi for that!

Prigglitz from above

Another onboard vid but here I just filmed my normal flying. I flew pretty high - and you can watch the second vid to see an "external" perspetive.
As you can see at the end I'm quite proud of my increasing landing skills :-)

Prigglitz from above from Mario Schimanko on Vimeo.

Prigglitz from above (external View) from Mario Schimanko on Vimeo.

I'd love to combine onboard with external vid but diffrent cams with different fps (24+30) don't mix good in one vid. BTW - this time just 640x480 but hopefully smoother (because here the 30fps of the source material should stay untouched).