Something very rare happened this weekend, it didn’t rain, or snow, or blow hurricane winds. It was actually good enough weather to go out and fly. So I grabbed my TwinStar with the pan/tilt HD camera setup that I have jet to try out, and ran out to the car and drove to the field before the weather-gods had time to change their minds.


The flight went great! The sun had just broken over the clouds and there was a mist over the town. The flight was so beautiful;

Click here to watch it in 1280*720 Read More...

Since the weather has turned fowl here in Sweden and it’s getting dark well before I get home, I decided it was time to dust of the old hotwire cutter.

This time I will be making a 120cm wingspan Zagi10 flying wing. It will simply be a 50% scaled up version of the old AitT wing.

I will call it the Big Always in the Trunk wing or BAitT for short.

Click here to continue to read about the BAitT project

Yay! Today I got a new 1.3GHz 300mW transmitter and a 1.3GHz receiver!

I placed an order after the flight with the HD camera that didn’t turn out that well.
I plan on making a guide on how to mount a more effective, lighter and more crash resistant antenna on this transmitter. I will also remove the connector and replace it whit directly soldered cables. That way I don’t need to worry about the connector suddenly giving up during flight.
Now all I need is some good weather this weekend and I should be able to test it out properly

I decided to have myself just one more try on making the HD camera work with a remote sensor PCB.

At least it looked nice.



I was super careful with every solder point and confirmed that every point was good in a microscope. I also measured all the connections with a multimeter. I pair twinned all the cables and then twisted ground wires around every pair. I then added epoxy to make sure that no cable or solder joint would be stressed or damaged while testing the camera out.

I hooked up the display and plugged in the USB power... First a flicker on the display... Then a for a split second a black display... But then! I can see my self! I've got picture!
But? There is something wrong? The picture isn't moving?
I stretched out my hand and grabbed the camera lens and swiveled it around a bit, but the picture remained the same. No matter what I did, the picture wouldn't change. So I tried rebooting the camera. The display flickered on and only displayed a black picture with the OSD information on it this time. I tried again, and again, and again. I tried pushing buttons, moving the camera head around, letting the power be unplugged for minutes, letting the power be plugged in for minutes before powering it up. No matter what I tried I could not get it to work. I couldn't even get a frozen picture like the first time I booted it up. After an hour, with no progress, I stopped trying.
I had one more thing to try before I gave up. I powered up my soldering iron, plugged in my heat gun and starting cutting up some heat shrink. I decided to shorten every single wire by about half or 4 cm.

A couple of hours work later I was done. Ready for another try. I plugged in the display once more and powered it up... Black... only a black screen with the OSD numbers... I tried again. Same results. I tried pushing buttons, plugging stuff in an out but I knew, deep inside that I was defeated, once again by my archenemy, the Camlileo P10...

In episode #118 of ATTF Diggs and Jamie talks about my latest FPV video.
Jamie calls it — "The coolest FPV video I've ever seen before", he particularly liked the part in the ending when I fly by the tractor.

It's funny to hear them trying to pronounce "Dadde".

They start to talk about it at 19:50 into the show.

You can download the episode here: ATTF #118.MP3

A big thank you to all the guys at ATTF!



I was also mentioned on the show a while back

I think this was one of the best FPV flights I've done! It was such a good feeling cruising around in the clouds. The weather couldn't have been better and the setting sun made this one of my favorite flights ever.


More info on my FPV FunJet setup can be found here

In an attempt to reduce the all up weight on my FPV FunJet, I decided to try and power the FPV gear from the main battery, and thus being able to remove the 52 grams heavy 3s500 battery that I usually power it with.

This is my first attempt, a 1mH 1A inductor in series and a 470uF capacitor in parallel on the output side.
This worked OK, but there was some small lines still appearing during high current draw. ( You can see them in the beginning of this video)
After that flight I added a few extra small capacitors which got rid of the lines completely. But another problem came to light, I got less range. This is because the voltage of the main battery is often down at 10 Volts or so and the transmitter is made for 12V. That voltage difference is enough to make the transmitter loose output power and reduce the range. I still got good range, but not as good as I get from using a separate LiPo.

So I decided to scrap my homebuilt filter and order myself an AnyVolt micro, which is a step up/step down converter that can handle both voltages above, the same, and lower than the output, which is necessary for this kind of application.

It just arrived and I hope to be able to start testing it soon. Stay tuned!

After the failure with getting the HD camera working on a ribbon cable, I decided to make a crude solution, and here it is!

I use a Turnigy S3101S Servo for the pan and a HTX900 for the tilt.

Those of you with sharp eyes may already have noticed that I'm using a different antenna on the video transmitter. I've been experimenting with different antenna lengths and materials. I'm using a single wire isolated cable that is stiff enough to hold its shape in the air, but bends in a crash. So far it's been working way better than I expected in the FPV FunJet. In fact all my FunJet FPV videos is made with this antenna. I will be doing a guide on how to make one of these antennas soon.

Back to the testing of the Pan/Tilt of the HD camera. I've tested it out in the apartment and it works like a charm. So I decided to go out to the field and try it out in the air.
The video TX in the TwinStar II hasn't been used for nearly a year, in fact I haven't used it since I had a crash with it. But it has worked fine when I tested it out at home. But as soon as I thew the airplane into the air, the picture went black. Lucky enough, since it was my first flight with the transmitter I didn't do it in FPV right away, but rather did it visually and recorded the video feed.

Dissapointed I went home. I took the video TX apart, but I can't find anything wrong with it. It looks like I have to order myself a new 1.3GHz transmitter before I can try the pan/tilt for the HD camera.

(This is the video that's in the SimpleOSD review)

I can recommend watching the landing at 4:15

I have now finished the SimpleOSD Ultralight edition review!

I hope you like it!