When I was in junior high one of my favorite things was my Airhogs Aero-Ace bi-plane. The aeroace was a highly regarded RC airplane. It was simple to fly out of the box, could take a beating, and would keep going after many many hard "landings".
I had two or three of these after all was said and done, While they were extremely durable, there is only so much they could take. If I remember correctly the adhesive holding one of my motors on my first unit eventually gave out mid flight and caused some pretty bad damage. I tried to fix it but it never flew the same.
My second unit never had such a catastrophic failure, but eventually the LiPo battery gave out and I could only get a few minutes flight before it fell back to the ground. This plane was lost/ destroyed several years ago. This leads me to my current project. Given my recent resurgence into the RC aircraft area I wanted to try to find and fly one of these planes again. So, over the last few months I have been periodically searching ebay for a decent deal. Luckily, I found one, not a bi-plane but their single winged version which I have read was an even better model.
The item was listed as "opened" but looks brand new, possibly never flown. I doubted it, but the pictures and general description looked OK, so I took the chance.
It showed up in 4 days wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper. The box had a slightly musty basement smell, not surprising since these things were at least 6-7 years old and was probably stored in a basement somewhere.
Inside the box all seemed well, from the top at least. One of the first things I noticed after pulling the plane out was the worn paint directly under the cockpit from being launched many times. Obviously not new, also not surprising, but otherwise everything looked in good order. Awesome!
The controller however, while fine on the front, had indeed been stored for several years...full of AA batteries. Every single one had corroded and leaked. I didn't take pictures, but it took about half an hour with rubbing alcohol, paper towels, and various scraping tools to being it back to something that might work. Fortunately the transmitter was sitting face up the entire time, so none of the battery acid leaked inside to the electronics.
So! a fresh set of batteries later and the transmitter lives again! With the aero-ace, the plane is charged by the transmitter. So, I plugged in the plane, the green LED lit, and 20 minutes later the LED was out and it was time to test.
I turned everything on, and pushed the throttle full forward, and the results were!...extremely underwhelming. Both motors did turn, but with very little power. Pushing the steering control did reduce the speed of one one motor respectively. Everything worked, but as I expected the battery appeared to be shot.
Replacing these is neither new, or difficult, which is great. Thanks to the recent explosion in popularity of mini multi-copters single cell 100-250+ mAh LiPo batteries are pretty easy to come by. First, however, I need to get inside the plane and take out the old battery and its protection circuit.
Unlike the bi-plane version, as I remember at least, this plane has a little cutout where the battery was inserted to begin with, convenient.
Inside is a little 3.7V 150mAh LiPo battery with a protection circuit soldered directly to the tabs of the battery.
In general, the batteries that are easily available are larger in capacity, size, and weight than this one. Which isn't exactly a bad thing, most of the time, these planes needed a little bit of nose weight added for stable flight anyway.
I found this battery on Amazon that is a little bigger than the stock battery, but had a pretty good price. The hope was that the slight weight difference would work in my favor.
In the mean time, while I waited for the battery to arrive, I wanted to see if a significantly larger battery would work. So, I pulled out one of the 250mAh batteries for my 1SQ mini quadcopter. Long story short, it was too heavy for the plane. While it would mostly glide, gaining altitude and turning wasn't going to happen.
I guess I need to wait for my new batteries to show up.
3D Printed Mini Star Trek the Next Generation Warp Core with Neopixles
Background:
I first found a model of the Star Trek Next Generation warp core on Thingiverse about a year ago. The designer made it large enough to be about the size of a table lamp. I ,of course, wanted one instantly, however, I was a little wary of the print time all of the pieces required. At the time, my Solidoodle 2 wasn't the most reliable machine for prints longer than an hour or two. The largest part on this model would take about 12 hours to print, which meant overnight, and me not being able to keep an eye on it.
One year and several modifications to the 3D printer later, this project seems incredibly doable. At the same time, I needed to come up with some Christmas presents for my geeky friends and brother. Christmas was just a few weeks away and I did not have the time to print 3 "full size" warp cores, and construct them. At 25% scale however, I could do that.
Here is a video of the warp core completed, so you can know what you are getting into.
Here is the link for the video external to this page:
All the parts are printed at 25% normal size, .3mm layer height, and 40% fill.
(They could probably be at a lower percentage fill, but this is just what I had my slicer set at.)
(All credit for the Warp Core 3D design needs to go to ThePlanetMike. His work on the 3D model is awesome.)
I also needed to design a platform of sorts for the warp core to sit on, but to also hold the Adafruit Trinket that drives the neopixel strip. Here is a link to that file on Thingiverse: 25% warp core base
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:666957
The side opening for the USB port was designed to fit the mini USB male connector on a cable I bought from Amazon. It should be big enough to fit most USB mini connectors, but if not, it can be widened with an exact-o knife.
I left out the three white pieces that are in the center of the "Warp Core MARC4.stl" file. At that scale they were just too frustrating and brittle for me to mess with at the time. This ended up making a pretty cool light effect that can be seen later on.
Electronics:
I used the 5V version of the trinket sold by Adafruit right here: 5V Adafruit Trinket
Solder the header pins that come with the trinket to the board.
The underside of the board is going to be facing inward on the base. That is, towards the warp-core. Orienting it this way gives easy access to the reset button so the board can be reprogramed if you want to change the light effects. To fit in the base, and allow the USB plug to fit, the entire assembly needs to be pretty thin. To achieve this I used a piece of proto-board with copper traces cut to fit on the trinket.
To make this work, some of the traces need to be cut with an Exact-o or equivalent. In the code that I provide, Pin 2 is used as the data pin. If you decide to use a different pin, obviously, you need to cut the traces in the way that works for your design.
IMPORTANT! Remove the black pin spacers from the header pins after you have soldered the pins in place. This lets the proto-board sit flush with the Trinket board.
Trim the extra pin length that sticks over the proto-board as low as possible without compromising the solder joint. I saved these trimmed pieces to use to bridge the solder pads together!
How to orient the board and where to cut traces
Using the extra pin length to connect the Trinket pins to the copper traces
The 5V line, Pin 2 for data and then the ground pin on the opposite side.
I used another set of 4 header pins to connect the two strips.
Even up the header spacer so there is approximately an even amount of pins on either side of the spacer. Then solder to the DOUT side of one of the strips. It is important to mate up the DOUT of one strip to the DIN of the other strip. Otherwise...it just won't work.
Then, solder the other side of the header to the DIN side of the other strip of LED's.
Finally, solder the DIN Pads of the LED Strip directly to the proto-board on the Trinket at a right angle. This is NOT a very structurally sound joint. It will need to be reinforced with hot glue. Otherwise there is a good chance that if bumped or moved, the pads on the LED strip will be ripped off the PCB. That's a bad thing.
Sorry, some of these pictures didn't come out perfectly. I think the idea gets across though.
Before you reinforce the joint with hot glue, this is a good point to program the board and make sure that everything is working. Just be gentle with the assembly.
The code is simple, and is easily modified to do different patterns and colors, please, feel free to do so. To program the trinket you need to use a special configuration of the Arduino IDE that is provided on the Adafruit site. Once you have that downloaded, it programs just like any other Arduino. There are countless tutorials on the inter-webs about this so I won't repeat it here.
IMPORTANT! The 5V pin of the Trinket is only capable of supplying 150mA of current, for the code below, that is just fine. If you modify the code and turn on more LED's at once (including multiple colors on the same die) it might cause a brownout.
Here is the code that I used:
// NeoPixel Ring simple sketch (c) 2013 Shae Erisson
// released under the GPLv3 license to match the rest of the AdaFruit NeoPixel library
#include <Adafruit_NeoPixel.h>
// Which pin on the Arduino is connected to the NeoPixels?
#define PIN 2
// How many NeoPixels are attached to the Arduino?
#define NUMPIXELS 16
// When we setup the NeoPixel library, we tell it how many pixels, and which pin to use to send signals.
// Note that for older NeoPixel strips you might need to change the third parameter--see the strandtest
// example for more information on possible values.
Adafruit_NeoPixel pixels = Adafruit_NeoPixel(NUMPIXELS, PIN, NEO_GRB + NEO_KHZ800);
int delayval = 250; // delay for half a second
void setup() {
pixels.begin(); // This initializes the NeoPixel library.
}
void loop() {
// For a set of NeoPixels the first NeoPixel is 0, second is 1, all the way up to the count of pixels minus one.
while(1){
for(int i = NUMPIXELS - 1; i >= (NUMPIXELS/2); i--) {
// pixels.Color takes RGB values, from 0,0,0 up to 255,255,255
pixels.setPixelColor(i, pixels.Color(0,0,255)); // Blue Bright
pixels.setPixelColor(i+2, pixels.Color(0,0,40)); // Blue Not So Bright
pixels.setPixelColor((NUMPIXELS-1)-i, pixels.Color(0,0,255)); // Blue Bright
pixels.setPixelColor((NUMPIXELS-3)-i, pixels.Color(0,0,40)); // Blue Not So Bright
pixels.show(); // This sends the updated pixel color to the hardware.
delay(delayval); // Delay for a period of time (in milliseconds).
pixels.setPixelColor(i, pixels.Color(0,0,0));
pixels.setPixelColor((NUMPIXELS-1)-i,pixels.Color(0,0,0)); // Setting the pixel to no output
pixels.setPixelColor((NUMPIXELS-3)-i,pixels.Color(0,0,0)); // Setting the pixel to no output
pixels.setPixelColor(i+2,pixels.Color(0,0,0));
pixels.show();
}
}
}
Just copy that code and flash it to the Trinket and you should have a blue strip that scans to the middle joint of the Neopixel strip. After that is working, reinforce the joint with hot glue.
Use hot glue to reinforce the joint
Use hot glue to reinforce the joint
Now, mount the electronics into the base. I like to plug in the USB cable and make sure the LED's are square from both the front and side and then hot glue the PCB into place.
All that is left is to assemble the warp core around the LED strips. I used super glue, but thin layers of hot glue would work as well.
If you look at the full scale version of the warp core, the middle most black support piece that holds the white light ring should probably be flipped. So its "base" is above the vertical pillars. Doing that makes the whole thing look a little better, but its a minor detail.
These made great gifts and everyone who got one loved it!
