Finally! An R/C Related Post!

Well, since I have been doing book reviews, that took away from some of my free time to do r/c stuff, which is how this blog started. I'm finally book free and now I'm back to r/c again!

A friend at work was very generous and offered to give me all the parts he had previously purchased to build a quadrotor. If you don't know what a quadrotor is, check this video from UPenn out.

Okay, so mine isn't that fancy but that was cool wasn't it?

So, since my friend was so generous to give me his parts, I had to build it and I have wanted to build one for a while so it was a perfect opportunity to learn to fly one.

I finally got around to building it and took my time over President's Day weekend. Once I got it built, then I had to tune the control board up so the settings were just right. The problem I had though is around that time, I started to sell and upgrade things as some of the stuff I had were actually selling for more than I paid, so the tuning had to be put on hold while I was on a crazy selling spree. The plus side is I have MUCH nicer gear now for little extra cost and a brand new Spektrum DX8 radio! Anyway, here's how my quad looks after having been built.

So, now that I'm back in the swing of spring, I have lots of yardwork to do. My wife has been sick all week with a crazy temperature but that actually gave me a chance to get even more done since I had to take some time off work. That was actually a hobby blessing in disguise.

This evening, after the kids went to bed, I finally had the chance to take it out on a calm evening and fly and did it fly well! It flew so well that I decided to test out my new anti-vibration mount on my quad to see if I could get good, smooth video from my GoPro video camera. Here's how it turned out.

Quite good and there's no jello effect as the mount worked wonderfully! I got the idea from www.rcexplorer.se on his v2.5 tricopter build. Excellent idea David!

So, there you have it. I finally did something worthwhile r/c related. Next up is mounting all my wireless video gear onto it and flying from the perspective of the quad! Then it's on to my airplane build.

Stay tuned as I should have something to post in the next year! Hopefully it won't take that long.