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Eco Piccolo Micro Indoor/Outdoor Helicopter Video
One Lump Or Two: March 2003 Well i thought i'd try n have a go at making somat to
demonstrate good hover control... i was doing fine until the tape started
rolling and my hovering skills left me (over correction syndrome), in
a 10x10 room showing object repulsion and air turbulence effects. anyway
here's the highlights of what happened. more like a Piccolo snuff movie! Piccolo FP (165g/5.8oz no batts), Orion Elite motor 10T pinion, Hornet GF/CF (1550rpm) Blades & paddles, Swash Plate ball insert(www.helinut.com), Ali hub(www.helinut.com), Skysports 6, 2 x 1020mAh Kokams(45g/1.58oz).
To drop the sugar i used a third servo on channel 5 on my Pic+ board which corresponds to the 'gear' switch on my cheapo Skysports6 TX G310on3x1020withHCFblades.avi: May 2003 Lovely blade noise. An indoor short little snip like
"One Lump Or Two". Demonstrating G-310 powered Piccolo on
3 Lithium Kokams (3x1020mah originals, 10.8v nominal) with home made
plastic head stiffener mod n Hornet CF blades buzzing hard.
DarkHorse-FF-Cruising June 2003 General Forward Flight n flying about. G-310 powered FP Piccolo on 3 Lithium Kokams (3x1020mah originals, 10.8v nominal) with home made plastic head stiffener mod n Hornet CF blades. the near vertical crash that nearly nails the camera
operator:
FFF-G310on3x1020withHCFblades.zip: (3 files in zip)
May 2003 3 short little outdoor clips (edited highlights). Demonstrating
breezy Fast Forward Flight, G-310 powered FP Piccolo on 3 Lithium
Kokams (3x1020mah originals, 10.8v nominal) with home made plastic head
stiffener mod n Hornet CF blades. More lovely blade noises.
Flight school Piccolo 3D orientation #1 June 2003 DELETED no space... ... DarkHorse-3DC-mishaps.avi
(watch that chicken run) tip. the V shape has been filled with paper n CA, then sanded back, added thin sticky taped to smooth stream line finish. Total cost of all above repairs = £0.2 for glue
and about 5 man hours. not Outside2-Orion On 2 Liths HCF blades: May 2003 Pretty poor example of a camera man who captures nothing
but all the dull bits of an out door flight in the breeze. Demonstrating
a little of an Orion Elite modified powered Piccolo on 2 Lithium Kokams
(2x1020mah originals, 7.2v nominal) with Hornet CF blades.
Freestyle: September 2003 Demonstrating breezy Fast Freestyle/Scruffy Circuits, G-310 powered FP Piccolo on 3 Lithium Kokams (3x1020mah originals, 10.8v nominal). Nothing particularly new from me in this vid, another fixed frame capture (no camera operator) but since i'v digitised it, here's a couple of minutes of condensed action, what i could salvage from two flights and multiple crashes. none fatal and not where u'd expect, i was dead jamy at times. It took me quite a while to settle down and when i did managed to do some more elegant controlled flying, the heli was out of shot (cut!). mostly suffered from lazy tail work (practise), too much cyclic response (20mm CF flybar setup for max and with linear Tx) which on reflection makes it very difficult to fly slowly. also started to suffer a lot of cell fade under load (at 14 degrees air temp?). The wind was not too bad, roughly constant around 5
mph. oh, hope u can enjoy (endure) the slightly abstract sound track
called 'soul in motion' by DJ Krust ;)
PiccoloMods: December 2003 This vid was supposed to demonstrate
my new Direct Drive tail system, sadly it doesn't as my flying was a
bit weak in a comfined narrow gardern (for me anyway). You will notice the on ski wheels, that are a left over from when my old 3x1020s cells faded and i resorted to taxi'ing around the carpet. LOL Misprint noted in the caption "120 HD" instead of 1200 HD The backing music snip is one of my own demo's called 'Secret Places', created using Reason 2.0 s/w.
Nose-In Indoor Training: December 2003 I'v pretty much ignored trying to learn 'nose-in' hover and took the outdoor Forward Flying route first for maximum fun. Whilst being able to do FF in any direction outdoors, 'hovering' at nose-in type orientations has been a problem for me, particularly indoors in a small room. Recently i'v made a determined effort to crack all nose-in type controlled hovering. Lucky my heli is reasonably stable in Ground Effect (high head speed), even in a cluttered room with a 6ft sq flying area and it will hover quite well, a couple of inches off the deck. The best thing to do (if u'r not impatient like me) is to warm up on an over tweaked simulator to get used to nose-in characteristics. Then warm up with the real Pic doing the usually tail-in and just past both side-in hover, with some low level lazy 8s for a few mins. Then manoeuvre into a safe area, turn the ship round and gently try to get air born under control. Skidding around at first... short hops seem to be going well, I just have a bit of trouble when the tail is off angle more than about 20 degrees. If I don't get the tail back in line then my corrections don't yet seem to be accurate enough and the heli becomes unstable, panic sets in the few micro seconds before the heli zips off (with some bail out tip over's). A stable GE cushion is quite a bonus as u can set the throttle an forget about it until you need to dump it in a hurry, falling only 1-12 inches, normally landing square on the landing gear. I found that if the heli is moving in very slow FF I
can circle pretty confidently in either direction. it won't be too long
before i have the dreaded indoor nose-in hover licked once and for all
!!!
Air Wolf up close April 2004 Once you've seen one standard AirWolf fuse you've probably seem them all but here's mine. I've tried to capture some interesting shots from various angles (in and outdoors) and I think I've managed to get something worth seeing, although not the FFF I wanted, just a few brief nervous blips of FF in a 13ft wide garden. Ikarus AirWolf foam body + retracts Piccolo FP Pic+
board, Hornet MS080 CF blades, G310 10T/96T, Direct Drive tail motor,
3x1200HD cells 11.2v, estimated AUW ~310g 1750 rpm in hover, 2100 rpm
max available.
5MB 20 second indoor ...TestClip1.wmv AirWolf - Reloaded On Patrol
June 2006 That was a good flight and we managed to get some good
shots, Don't be fooled, micro FPs with body kits are not often
this much fun.
Edited highlights version:
AirWolf - Blade CP head conversion,
570mm rotor, stretch tail August 2007 For more info see this thread. ...AirWolf-BladeCPhead-570mm.wmv
27MB 2.75min 50fps WMV DarkHorse-Piccolo FP Modified... May 2004 The highlights of a few flights as I try to get back
in the saddle again whilst outdoor testing the Himax 2015 2800rpm/v
+ Phoenix10 combo in my porky 286g Piccolo. The video is rather large
and shows some pretty country side in West Wales with some moderate
flying, nose in and FF circuits from various dizzy angles. I couldn't
decide what to edit out and the sound track is about the same length,
so I left it around 5 mins.
DarkHorse-PiccoloFP-Mods286gAUW-Himax2800-Ph10-3x1200-HornetCFs.wmv Moth
DarkHorse-Piccolo FP: SpyCam... makes me dizzy! Well it was a nice idea... I feel sick now. I don't
recommend trying to stitch 2 video streams (20 fragments) with out time
codes. Have a look: WMV format:
Here's the other video of some slightly less frantic
footage at higher altitude, cam only, no sound and therefore less interesting:
Supplementary woffle: The Rx unit for the spy cam is sat on open vellux roof
window below the chimney on the house in the distance (30 meters line
of sight), which is connected to a VHS video and recorded. Cam is 8-9v (200ma code number-KTK00C? read this: www.rc-cam.com/hk_video.htm) in the head with audio (which I can't receive so I cut the plugs off)... bodged onto 3x1200 lith cells, video works but vibration effects transition. Much less effected by electrical interference and worked very well on 3x1200HDs. Vibration reduces accurate signal decoding tho. I think this cam may have been OK on 11.2v but to be on the safe side I used 2 12v Xmas tree light bulbs in parallel with the cam in series to drop the voltage a little. Each light bulb measures 12ohm cold but when lit is closer to 40ohm. 1/r = (1/40) + (1/40)... r = ~20ohms in series with the cam. I also bodged some capacitors across to help smoothing. Video production: I used Pinnacle Studio Version 8 updated to 8.5 and
crashes all the time :mad:. I used animated DVD menus, customized (bodged!)
to render 2 button previews of the 384x288 (no grid measurements so
I guessed), ended up with 360x288(ish) twice across a 720x576 frame.
Rendering lost some quality as I didn't have or know of any alternative
s/w to use. When the timed DVD menu sequences render to AVI segments
they give the required stream stitch (nightmare!). then append/edit
the segments and render for Internet etc. DarkHorse-Piccolo FP Thrashing Around... Sept 2004 Testing out Thunder Power 1320s 10C cells and general
messing about. Check the full throttle tests and girlfriend's head near
miss :o. The extra power marging is taking some getting used to, lazy
tail work n throttle/cyclic coordination etc. more scruffy than I'd
like. Quite happy with this setup at the moment (how long will that
last?), shame the total flying weight is nearly 300g and the motors
get a bit hot. Check the serious flying face.
DarkHorse-PiccoloFP-ThrashingAround.wmv
DarkHorse-Piccolo Loop July 2005 Here ya go, this will make ya laugh. 2 FP loops and 2 crashes and some chatter.
DarkHorse-PiccoloFP-Loop.wmv Later off camera nearly did a roll due to a radio glitch
on loop entry pulled the tail round at a critical moment.
Creating Compressed AVI's With a 500Mhz PC i'v converted
to Virtualdub
1.4.9 (capture plus filters) and compress using DIVXMPG4
V3 codec (or try here).
for the equivalent picture quality tmpgenc
requires 6hr+ processing, where as Virtualdub takes less than 20mins.
if i could raw capture full frame and down sample the results should
look very good. sadly my capture card sucks and barely captures 25fps
of 384 x 288 RGB raw AVI. STOIK
Video / VideoPak Converter (Freeware) converts AVI and Windows Media
Video files. That was then. Now i use Pinnacle Studio 8, DV capture via firewire.
Coming soon... More classic various video and info at www.dream-models.com 
Intro Buying Building Learning Flying Upgrades & Mods Airwolf Body Tips Video Heli BB Glossary Links
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