[Mikko] is in to flying F3B racers – remote control airplanes with a three meter wingspan. These races require the pilot to know how much time he has left, and when flying a remote controlled airplane to the edges of visual contact, it’s just not possible to look down and check a stopwatch.
To solve this problem, [Mikko] created a talking F3B timer to announce the flight time and how much time is left in 30 second increments. It’s based on a WTV020 audio module that plays audio from an SD card. Right now it’s just in the prototype phase, but he does have some code and documentation online.
As for the easter egg, [Mikko] programmed his timer so that if the flight lasts exactly 33 seconds (with millisecond resolution), the Hackaday URL is displayed on the Nokia LCD. We’re betting a flight time of 33 seconds would be highly correlated with a horrible malfunction and the loss of a thousand dollar airframe, so we’re more than happy to cheer [Mikko] up if he eventually sees this easter egg in the field.
Video of the talking timer speaking Finnish below, and a video showing off what these huge sailplanes can do right here.
This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!
Jei! Finland on hackaday again!
F3B are GLIDERS – not racers. They do CONTESTS not RACES.
http://www.sloperacer.co.uk/_content/vampire.asp
If that is the one they are using, then it is, indeed, a racer.
F3B is thermal gliding. Although there is a speed section, it’s all against the clock.
A: 7 minutes (soon 10 min.) thermal flight with precision spot landing
B: 4 minutes distance flight over 150 m closed circuit
C: Speed flight over 4×150 m
F3F is slope soaring. It has a course (i.e. pylons) but the gliders are still doing a timed event against the clock (10 laps around 100m course – shortest time over 3 runs wins).
Guess it depends on your definition of “racing”. For me, if there aren’t other planes in the air that YOU are directly competing against, it’s not a race. Same reason they call fun fly contests events, not races, because it’s all against a score card or stopwatch or counter, not directly against other planes.
No matter what you call it, it’s still loads of fun (and way harder then you would imagine).
A data recorder logging the g’s they pull with these would be interesting.
The (relatively) cheap 9X transmitter clones are known as very hackable and voice announcements is one of their standard mods. Since they only come with a buzzer built in, you need to add a speaker and an SD card reader + mp3 decoder chip (there are some chips that do both things, made for mp3 players). The transmitter has an Atmega mcu that can be programmed with Open9X or Er9X, Tgy9X, etc., where you can enable the audio mod and have the transmitter anounce your flight time, telemetry data and anything else.