Taranis first model setup

When setting up my first model I bound it and then went flying.

After thinking a bit more I realized there are a few settings that I should pay attention to.

1) Throttle cutoff.

On the inputs menu (page 5) Long press enter and then "insert after". I edited the first one and set it to "weight:0 offset:-100 and set the switch to SB up". I set the second one to normal (weight:100 offset:0 and SB down)

So when Taranis powers on, it wants all switches in the up mode. In this setting, the throttle stick does nothing. I can't accidentally turn it on without first touching the switch to set it all the way to the down position.

2) Dual Rates.

Similar to above, I set the aileron (which I actually have plugged into rudder) and elevator to both operate on switch G (SG) so that the default is low rates and the down position is high rates.The process here is the same. Long press enter and "insert after" and then edit the first one setting it for SG up and weight at, say 50. I also set expo which makes the sticks "softer" in the middle and "faster" at the extremes. You can do this or not.

FrSky Taranis initial setup

I bought a frsky taranis x9d as my radio as this seems to be what many of the people on the internet recommend. There are a lot of different radios out there and all of them function just fine but the Taranis has a TON of options to customize the radio. I don't know how to use most of them now but in the future they may prove useful

When you first get the radio, it needs a little bit of configuration. Long press menu from the main screen and you'll see a bunch of options about date and volume and other general settings. Configure these as you like. Here's a nice reference on how this page works.

Basically set the time, the battery range, (I use 7.0-8.5), set volume like you want, and any alerts. There's nothing particularly fancy here. Page 8 of the setup is calibration. You should go through this. It's just a matter of setting the sticks in the middle, clicking enter, and then moving them around like it tells you to.

I pulled the SD card out of my Taranis to back it up and when I put it back into the transmitter, it wasn't playing the sounds. No "welcome to open tx", nothing. I tried to back up models and it just said "SD Card Error". Apparently the file system on the SD card got corrupted somehow. Maybe by not cleanly unmounting it. I reformatted the disk as FAT and then copied the backup stuff back on to the card. When I reinserted it, everything started working fine. So, if you want to back up the card (good idea) make sure you are careful to cleanly unmount the disk before removing it from your computer.

FT Tiny Trainer

I am building a flitetest tiny trainer with my daughter.


Here it is with the glider parts. We built the glider first before the transmitter arrived so we could play.












It's a plain speed build kit with their power pack A electronics.

Here it is with the power nose built and attached.














The build is very easy. There are no paper instructions, instead there is a build video available from flitetest that walks you through the process of constructing the plane. I bought some 1000 mAh batteries which are slightly too large to fit inside the fuselage really, so I strapped it to the top as you can see. It is nice because I can easily move it around to make the CG work.

Unfortunately it is also exposed during crashes so it can get thrown around a bit. The receiver is strapped on the back section because that allows me to move it around a bit also. It can fit inside but it is kind of tight.

Here's a video of my first flight

The first flight itself wasn't awful. Shortly afterwards, I crashed a few times and broke all my props. The ones I had in the kit were all 6x4.5 and I am going to try some other ones like 6x4 or 6x3 to see if that helps. Also, I am looking for some props that are made of a softer plastic so that they don't break so easily. It would be nice if they would bend a bit before just shattering.