Living Room Flyer Design Contest
Posted on October 20, 2009 by aaronredbaron
Its only due to advancements in technology in the last few years that modelers have gained the ability to fly model airplanes inside a normal sized living room. As early as 2001 micro receivers using proportional magnetic actuators became available, allowing people to build fully functioning RC planes as small as one ounce using off the shelf parts. With the release of the Parkzone line of Ultra-Micro airplanes, anyone could fly a tiny RC plane right out of the box. Using the electronics installed in the Parkzone airplanes for your own designs, airplanes can be taken from concept to first flight in a matter of hours.
On RCGroups.com in the Indoor and Micro Models section, the user all4smallrc set the parameters for a LRF (living room flyer) build competition. Click here to see the thread. There is no prize for the winner, other than the respect of fellow micro RC enthusiasts, but I for one am up for the challenge! I have scratch built a number of tiny RC models using a variety of electronics, and I happen to have a Parkzone Vapor I can cannibalize for parts, which is perhaps the best off-the-shelf LRF. I encourage you to enter the contest yourself if you have any interest. Building your own-design Micro RC model is one of the quickest and least expensive ways to explore your own concepts for flying contraptions. Be sure to check back for updates; I will be covering some of my design ideas first, then the build portion, and I’ll finish it up with a test flight and flight video.
Click here to see the follow up article on design concepts
[...] today and discussed ideas for the living room flyer (LRF) design contest going on over at RCGroups. Click here to see my first article about this design contest. We went over control arrangements, material selection, and came up with several concepts. We both [...]
[...] name product, until now. In the process of wrapping up my first prototype of the Living Room Flyer (click here to read about the LRF Design Contest) I ran out of Foam Safe CA. You cannot use regular CA on most types of foam without melting it; the [...]
[...] my first attempt at building a model capable of flying in a living room (click here to see the first article on the Living Room Flyer design contest), I was less than impressed. I decided to tweak the design and give it another try before I scrapped [...]