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| So you want to night fly your T-Rex but your aren't sure how to get started?
This is the article for you, so to begin let's talk about what equipment
you are going to need to embark upon a new career in night flying! Firstly lets list the equipment required in order to rig your T-Rex for night flight. |
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| In the bottom right picture you can see the cold light driver attached
to two cold light strings. The final connector goes to the receiver to
give power to the whole thing. This in itself presents a problem as many
six channel receivers only provide connectivity for the servos, ESC and
gyro (plus remote gain). The simple solution is to use a y-cable and connect
the cold light driver to the remote gain channel used by the gyro. The cold light driver is small enough to be taped to the inside of the canopy and the cold light strings can be threaded and cable tied into place across the whole of the model, canopy, boom and horizontal stabilisers. For extra safety it is also worth while getting some mini glow sticks to tie to the T-Rex skids. This gives you some redundancy in the system should the cold light strings fail in flight. Glow sticks are best sourced on e-bay. The following are some pictures of a fully rigged T-Rex provided courtesy of Pete Haywood who originally emailed me with his night flight T-Rex. |
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| Obviously Pete spent quite a bit of time getting his machine looking this good. Included below are some additional close-ups of how the strings are attached and a picture of the removal canopy with the cold light driver attached to it. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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| Align also do a device called a fifth switch controller, which can be used to switch the lights on or off from the transmitter. The fifth switch controller just plugs into channel 5 on the receiver and senses whether you have thrown the switch on the transmitter, allowing the lights to be turned on or off. Personally I think this isn't necessary as you would want the lights on all the time and accidentally turning them off might be a bit of a shock. Some further tips for night flying : Have some lighting available at gowned level as you need to be able to see where the ground is to land. Also make sure that any spectators and other pilots are well lit and not hidden in the dark. It is also worth remembering that although you might be able to see your helicopter, obstacles such as trees, posts and bushes don't have lights on them and by the time you realise they are there you may have already hit them, so pick a nice big open space. Some glow sticks on the ground can help with orientation when coming in to land. Always try to have some redundancy in the system, this article has two cold light strings but a failure of the driver would extinguish both. Therefore something like glow sticks secured to the skids is a good backup system. Currently there are no night blades available to fit the T-Rex, I'm hoping this will change but in the meantime the only solution is home grown blades. Any manufacturers reading this article might want to seriously think about night blades for the T-Rex as it is more of an outdoor heli than indoors and in my opinion ideal for getting into the sport of night flying as it is electric and therefore not going to upset anyone trying to get some sleep. My thanks to Robbe/Schluter UK for providing the Align cold light driver and strings for the photographs at the top of this article and also to Pete Haywood for his excellent pictures of the "Carbon Night Flyer". Lastly click here to see Pete's short video of the "Carbon Night Flyer" in action. |
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