March 31, 2008
My RC Helicopter (with video)
I bought a used Esky Honey Bee CP2 RC helicopter off of my friend Ray at Gatech. I finally got to where I can sort of fly it. It’s quite difficult, sort of like balancing a broomstick upright in the palm of your hand.
My first attempts a couple weeks ago I couldn’t get it off the ground due to a couple mechanical problems. It had an issue with the collective pitch sticking in a no-lift position and then the helicopter suddenly jumping up as the pitch snaps into position and almost flipping over (scary!). This is apparently a very common problem and online tutorials explained how to fix it (backwards stepped washer). I also had a problem with really strange behavior with the heli wanting to slide off to the side and was near impossible to correct for. This was caused by an unseen bend rod that the blades mount to. I have found this resource quite useful: HeliTown
I got everything rebuilt and then started practicing spinning it up in my condo. I could occasionally get off the ground for just a few seconds. Unfortunately there is just no room anywhere in the condo, but at least I got practice with the controls.
Here is a video of me flying the helicopter in my parent’s garage:
I have made a couple modifications to the helicopter including switching the transmitter to left-hand mode (resoldered the joysticks and swapped the joystick centering spring and clicker) and added fuses to the main and tail motors.
I did have a minor wreck shortly after the video. The tail got away from me and I lost my frame of reference for balancing, so I tried to set the helicopter down real quick. Unfortunately, I didn’t land level enough and the blades struck the ground causing some minor damage to the blades (and hopefully nothing else). I will probably need to get a computer simulator in order to learn to balance/hover in arbitrary orientations.