Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Hangar: Episode 12 – Programing Radio”.
Hello and welcome to maker hanger, my name is Lukas weekly and today we’re going to be setting up the radio for the maker trainer getting that all set up and we’re also going to be checking the CG of our airplane. So, let’s get started so before we get into any of the real programming. We first need to make sure that everything’s moving the right way and that the plane is bound. So that’s what I’m gon na do right now.
I have the bind plug already plugged in so what I’m gon na do is I’m gon na plug in a battery turn on the radio with the trainer switch held down powered on wait for it to find the light inside stops just starts flashing. Slowly, let go it’s now solid. Okay.
Now that we’re bound up, I’m gon na remove the vines bug close out the hatch and we’re gon na check to make sure all our control surfaces are zeroed out using the elevator as an example, we can take a popsicle. Stick as a reference of how flat it is, and we can put it over the control surface and we see that it’s pointed down a little bit. So what we’re gon na do is I’m gon na take off the servo arm and put it back on just change the where it is okay. So now you can see it’s facing up a lot more than what it was before it now we’re always going to want some a little bit of up trim on this, so that should be okay.
For now, you can always change that later, going to the ailerons. We’Re gon na flip the plane over. We can put our popsicle stick back on. We see that it’s facing a little bit too far down. So what we’re gon na do is I’m going to come in here with my exacto knife and pop off the servo arm? Just get it off and then in a position in it again using my exacto knife, put the servo arm back on okay, we have that one, let’s go over to the other side.
Now, if the control surface is in between like this is too far this way, but when you go one click over, it goes too far the other way. Then you have to redo your push, rod and that’s just undoing one of these, putting it back on changing the dimensions around a little bit so that it fits now. I’M gon na have to do this on this one and the other LR on. So let me show you how to do that, so you want to position the servo arm, so it’s facing it up or perpendicular with the surface of your wing and then you can go from there to make your adjustments to the push rod. So I kind of like it there, so I need to add some distance to the push rod.
I’M going to take this off, move it from here and go on this side over here. Go ahead and try that okay, now that we got the control surfaces all leveled out now we need to check which directions are moving in so we’re gon na flip the plane over now. Okay, so we have the plane facing away from us and here’s our controller. So we’re gon na check this stick over here.
This is what we’re going to be testing right now for the elevator. When you push it down on the stick, it should go up and obviously we’re reversed right now. So when I push it up, it goes up. This is not the right way and then the ailerons, when I push to this side, that side should come up the one that I’m pointing to so that’s right and then the same with the other side. It should go to where I’m pointing so yellow ions are fine, but the elevator needs to be reversed. So let me show you how to do that.
Okay, so going into the menu, we hit the side, scroll, we’re gon na scroll down to setup lists and going to reverse so we’re gon na find our elevator, which is right here and just click it and then go to the reverse. Now we can check it over here and now when we pull up, we see that it’s going up now. Okay, so if our ailerons were reversed, we could set that up right there, but mine are fine the way they are so we’re going to leave them. That’S how you reverse the service, so, let’s move on to doing the travel adjust? Okay, so the ailerons don’t really need to have travel adjusted for them, because that they’re pretty much unobstructed. Now the elevator is obstructed because it has the rudder in its way and also the tail boom at the bottom.
So we need to set the parameters on the limits of the control of the elevator. So when I go to pull up over here, you can see it’s touching here, but it’s also the servo is whining. That means that it’s under tension, so we’re gon na alleviate some of that tension by changing the travel adjust. Now, if we go down, you see we reach our limit there, but the servo keeps going so we’re bending our push rod. So you definitely want to change that as well.
Okay, so in the menu we’re going to scroll over to travel, adjust we’re going to go to the elevator, and we see that it’s a hundred and twenty-five percent. Now, normally it’s a hundred percent. I don’t know why that said. It’S a model anyway, we’re gon na bring this down to a hundred percent, and so you can see the arrow goes down it’s 120, so we’re gon na hold that scroll down to a hundred we’re basically scrolling down until we stop hearing the servo whine. So, let’s just go back to a hundred and five just for good measure. Okay, now for the next one going up, we do need to look at the plane. Okay. So when we push up on the stick, we can see the pushrod is being bent.
So what I’m gon na do is I’m gon na scroll, the wheel and doing the same thing that we did before and bring the number down until the push rod comes back to be straight, so that’s about 35 %. We still want to have some throw on the down elevator, even though the plane is always trying to go down, and but we definitely want much more up, elevator. Okay, so now the travel has been adjusted. So when I pull up it only comes to this point. Right here and then, when I push down, it only goes to its stopping point down there. The ailerons are set up so that they move a hundred percent in either direction, but this is a little bit too much so, instead of doing a travel, adjust, we’re actually gon na do dual rates so that we can get a different amount for these.
So let me show you how to do that so backing out of the travel adjust menu, we’re gon na, go back to the menu and go to dual rates and expo click. This now the aileron is at a hundred percent currently, and this is a lot and it’s gon na roll the plane really quickly. So I’m going to bring this down to about fifty percent okay, so the elevator is okay at a hundred percent, either ways since we set travel, adjust for its limits, and you definitely do want to keep it like that. But what we can do is add some expo so that it’s a little bit more controllable at the lower ends of the stick, so we’re gon na add about fifty or forty percent positive. You never want to go negative. We’Re gon na do we’re gon na do about the same for the ailerons as well.
Now the dual rates is activated by a switch and that can be assignable to one of these up here now. The aileron one is in a unique position because I can hit it really easily when I’m flying, so I want this one to control all three of my dual rates. So what I’m going to do is I’m gon na go back in the menu? Come backwards, go to the setup list, go down to dual rate combo and then set that up to the I Ella run. So now, when I go back to the list dual rates – and I flip this switch up in the top now – you can see that they all change back to a hundred percent.
So I can go back and forth and toggle between these two settings in flight. So this one would be more acrobatic than this one being more slow, flying and docile for beginners. So let’s look at what this did. Okay, so we have our stick and when we pull up, you can see that it’s very minimal at the bottom reaches of the stick, and then it goes up to their full movement, which is what we want to see for the ailerons. It’S the same way. They move slightly in the middle to give you more control, and then they go fifty percent which way for like this and now, if we flip the switch up it on top now we can see our ailerons are moving a lot more and our elevator is moving Constantly with our stick, so that is dual rates and that’s how you should set it up for beginner flying you don’t want to go 100 % on all the directions, because that is very hard to control.
Even for me, okay, so really quickly. Let’S check our directions again, so we go to the left. Aileron, the left, aileron comes up, go to the right, write down, a LaRon comes up, you pull up, and the elevator comes up now. We’Re gon na check our motor direction right now we can take off the nut and we’re gon na get our prop and we’re just gon na place it on to the shaft. Don’T tighten it down or anything we’re just gon na place it on we’re. Gon na run up the throttle a little bit and we see which way the prop is spinning. Now the way you mount the propeller is that the text, which is on the top faces towards the direction on which you’re going to be pushing in the plane. So in this case, the text faces towards the front of the plane.
So this is where we put it on and we can see that where the propeller is scooping, the air is being reversed to what we’re doing right now. So we’re going to take off the prop, you know go into our fuselage and we’re going to reverse our motor. It’S very simple to do just need to grab our wires out of here. Okay, take any two of them, like I explained before: unplug them switch them and plug them back in now. Sometimes I mess up, and I just plug them right back in to where they were before. So I always put it on before I button everything up to make sure I did it right, and I did so.
You know can now see that the scoops are scooping the air in the correct direction and that’s how you reverse the motor and test which what your direction is going. So I’m going to tuck all these wires back in now. This is one you can attach your ESC on the inside of your fuselage, or you can just let it dangle loose. It doesn’t really matter as long as it doesn’t come too close to your receiver.
Okay, so now that that’s in place, we can go ahead and put on our nut, be very careful of your throttle and this time, because now you have a life propeller and we now have thrust okay. So the final thing to go over is your center of gravity or your CG, and this is really important for when you fly your plane, because if it’s too tail-heavy the plane won’t fly at all, it’ll just do backflips and crash. But if it’s too nose-heavy, then you’re gon na be fighting it the whole time and you’re not going to be able to fly it and you probably won’t even be able to land or get altitude. So this is obviously pretty important now on the maker trainer I’ve pretty much designed it to take a twenty two hundred milliamp 3-cell up in the front.
We put the velcro there before. Let me go ahead and unplug this, so the CG is where the plane balances. Now I could give you fancy measurements on where the you put your fingers to make it balanced such like that, but every plane is going to be different and depending where you put your wing, that’s also going to change your CG. So the way that I normally do this is, I put the battery in and then I go outside and I hold this over my head and I go running with it and then, when I’m running at a fast enough speed and then I feel that it’s getting Lift then I let go and see what it does.
I always keep my hand next to it, so it doesn’t fall. If it falls backwards, then it’s too far back and you can move your battery a little bit farther forward. If it knows is down, then your two nose-heavy and you can bring the battery a little farther back now when you get it perfect, it should say perfectly level when you let go of it and then come back into your head once you get to that point. You might want to go a little bit farther forward on the battery having a little bit slightly.
Nose-Heavy plane is better than having slightly tail heavy plane, because all that’s gon na do is it’s gon na self right itself, because it’s falling straight down and all you have to do – is pull up to get out with a nose heavy plane. You always have to be pushing down and it’s just going to be flying backwards. So that’s it for a CG and that’s pretty much it for the setup and you’re ready to fly. So you might have been wondering what all these switches next to the sticks do, and these are called trim tabs.
They allow you to trim out your airplane or get it to fly better now. Basically, what you’re gon na do for these? Is you can’t really set them on the ground? You have to set them while you’re flying so saying your plane is pitching down. So that means that you’re gon na be pulling up on your elevator. So, instead of having to hold down your elevator the entire time flying well, you can use the trim tabs, which is kind of like a permanent stick and push it down which will elevate your elevator.
So it’s just like you holding the stick down like here and when you’re trimming out in the air. You can incrementally add these to make the plane just fly straight when you like over the controls, which is what you want so say. If we’re banking to one-way – and we always have to be holding it to the right well, then you can add right, trim to it and it’ll do the same thing as you holding it. So that’s what trim does you can’t really set this until you’re flying and it’s pretty easy to go and set? All you have to do is while you’re flying get up high enough that if it’s nosing down you can compensate for it and get up enough air and then quickly come over. Here, click it a couple times, go back and then go from there and keep doing it again until it’s tuned out and trimmed. Once you have a trim, then it will fly perfectly and you don’t have to mess up to that again.
That’S it for this episode! Next time, I’m going to show you how to use a flight simulator to learn how to fly so I’ll, see you then, thanks for watching .