Exceed Pitts S2A second flight
Posted by Akom • Sunday, September 7. 2008 • Category: ToysThe broken wing was dry this morning (see previous post) and the wind was almost nonexistent, despite the hurricane that went through overnight.
I'm off to fly! This time around I moved the servo pulls to the second hole, making the controls slightly more sensitive (I have been getting better with the simulator, and the last flight it felt a little unresponsive). I also set the elevator to fully horizontal position - I had it pointed down slightly last time, also out of caution, but this morning it didn't even want to take off this way.
It flies!
Again it is a little tail-heavy, but it is basically controllable, and I even did a corkscrew when it was high up enough. Once again I got about 3 minutes of flight before the plane decided to call it a day - this time the battery ran down. I heard the motor slowing down but in disbelief (I charged it!) so I tried revving up once or twice - nope, it is dying. So I brought it down as quickly as I could, but I didn't trust myself to steer it into the asphalt - so it's a nose-in landing on the grass, with the gear coming off. Works for me if there is nothing breaking.
So the battery... The day before I had it on charge for 45 minutes at least, it not being empty to begin with - so I figured that's good enough (1200mah battery being charged by a 0.8A charger). Apparently not... today the E-Sky balancing charger took at least 3 hours to charge the empty battery! I guess it drains some of the cells to balance them, so I might have actually depleted the pack when I charged it incompletely.
Since the E-Sky charger gives me no information besides a blinking green light (and I guess I'm a control freak) I bought the super fancy charge-anything-and-explain-what-I'm-doing charger from Deal Extreme ($50) (link)
I guess I was too concerned about exploding batteries.
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