How To Set Up A 3-6Ch Radio (Class 4)
Posted February 5th, 2009 at 11:32 AM by ThursdayBeginnerBlog
Items that were mentioned in this video:
Free Plans Extra 300
Grayson Sukhoi EPP
Ready to Fly Wild Hawk
Y-connector for servo slaving
BEC to absorb extra volatage when running 6 or more servos per ESC.
A few notes of review to remember from this week's video. And remember, your 3-6 channel radio may or may not have all of these functions. You need to consult your personal instruction manual and work through it. Sorry, there is no shortcut to this. Invest your time, get it figured out, and it will be easy after that.
Servo Centering
Before you install your servo into your plane, be sure that it's centered and your radio trim is in neutral. Turn your radio on, center the trim, plug the servo into the receiver, and let it center itself. Now you know it's centered and ready to be put in your plane.
Servo Reversing
If your servo is going the wrong way, you can take if off your plane and flip it over, this will manually reverse it. Or you can even flip only the servo arm to the other side leaving your servo in place if this works out. Most radios will have a reverse switch, knob, or computer setting.
Servo Travel
If your servo does not move enough, remember you can adjust that manually like we covered last week (scroll down). You do this by putting the push rod on the servo arm on the FARTHEST hole and the clevis on the control horn on the SHORTEST hole. If you have a 6ch radio you can also go into your settings and increase or decrease the amount of travel for each servo.
Servo Slaving
Like everything else here, consult your manual as you may be able to do servo slaving from your radio. If not, just get a simple y-connector and plug it in. Works great.
Trim
When you take your plane off, its going to veer to the right, left, up, down, whatever. You correct this while it's flying by using your trim tabs on your radio. As much as you can, adjust your pushrods manually so you do not waste your trim clicks.
Sub Trim
Most of the time you should not need this. As much as you can adjust the trim of the airplane as close as you can manually with the control horns be extending or shortening the clevis at the end of the pushrod (see last week's video, scroll down). But if you really need to, you can go into your radio and there should be a setting to allow you to trim it even more from there.
--------------------------------
Free Plans Extra 300
Grayson Sukhoi EPP
Ready to Fly Wild Hawk
Y-connector for servo slaving
BEC to absorb extra volatage when running 6 or more servos per ESC.
A few notes of review to remember from this week's video. And remember, your 3-6 channel radio may or may not have all of these functions. You need to consult your personal instruction manual and work through it. Sorry, there is no shortcut to this. Invest your time, get it figured out, and it will be easy after that.
Servo Centering
Before you install your servo into your plane, be sure that it's centered and your radio trim is in neutral. Turn your radio on, center the trim, plug the servo into the receiver, and let it center itself. Now you know it's centered and ready to be put in your plane.
Servo Reversing
If your servo is going the wrong way, you can take if off your plane and flip it over, this will manually reverse it. Or you can even flip only the servo arm to the other side leaving your servo in place if this works out. Most radios will have a reverse switch, knob, or computer setting.
Servo Travel
If your servo does not move enough, remember you can adjust that manually like we covered last week (scroll down). You do this by putting the push rod on the servo arm on the FARTHEST hole and the clevis on the control horn on the SHORTEST hole. If you have a 6ch radio you can also go into your settings and increase or decrease the amount of travel for each servo.
Servo Slaving
Like everything else here, consult your manual as you may be able to do servo slaving from your radio. If not, just get a simple y-connector and plug it in. Works great.
Trim
When you take your plane off, its going to veer to the right, left, up, down, whatever. You correct this while it's flying by using your trim tabs on your radio. As much as you can, adjust your pushrods manually so you do not waste your trim clicks.
Sub Trim
Most of the time you should not need this. As much as you can adjust the trim of the airplane as close as you can manually with the control horns be extending or shortening the clevis at the end of the pushrod (see last week's video, scroll down). But if you really need to, you can go into your radio and there should be a setting to allow you to trim it even more from there.
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Total Comments 3
Comments
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Good stuff. There's one thing you could mention (maybe in every video) about radios: Unless your radio is 2.4 GHz never turn on the transmitter until you know for sure there are no flyers in the range using the same channel.Posted February 5th, 2009 at 06:02 PM by lattu 
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More on Brushed and Brushless motors...
Both kinds of motor have several coils of wire in them, and several permanent magnets. The coils, when energized, form an electromagnet; which is either attracted to the permanent magnets or, if the poles are flipped, repelled from them. The magnets are mounted in the motor such that the poles alternate N-S-N-S etc.
If you just energized a coil, the rotor would snap around so that the N pole of the electromagnet is closest to the S pole of the nearest permanent magnet. So, to keep it spinning, you have to switch on one coil, then the next, and the next, so as to keep the poles pulling towards each other. The big difference between the two kinds is in how this is done.
Brushed motors, as the name implies, have brushes inside them, that transfer power to the coils. The coils are mounted on the rotor; and the brushes are attached to the housing of the motor. So, as the rotor spins, each set of coils is switched on by coming into contact with the brushes, causing it to pull to the next permanent magnet pole, which brings the next coil around, repeating the cycle. To control the speed of the motor, you just need to control how much power goes into the brushes (and thus the coils)... most brush-type ESCs just switch the motor on and off really fast (like, 20 thousand times per second), and depending on the speed desired, will vary how long the motor is on vs. how long it's off. The wires going to the motor are labeled positive and negative so that when you hook them up that way, the motor spins in particular direction (you can flip them around and it will spin backwards).
Brushless motors have the coils mounted to the fixed part of the motor (in outrunner motors, that's the center part; in inrunner motors, it's the outer housing). And as you would guess - brushless motors have no brushes... so, how do you switch the coils on and off in the right order at the right time? That's what the brushless ESC does -- and as you might also guess, brushless ESCs are much more complicated than brush-type ones! The ESC has a small computer in it, which watches what the motor is doing (it can sense it based on the back voltage induced across the coils - remember, a motor and a generator are the same device, fundamentally; it's just that one is optimized for turning electricity into motion, and the other is optimized for turning motion into electricity) and pushes current through the right coils at the right time.
Most brushless motors are 3-phase -- there are 3 coils of wire in the motor (and just about all of them in the hobby are; I've never seen a non-three-phase brushless motor for hobby use). These may be wired as a delta -- the coils if you laid them out on your desk would form a triangle, and each wire coming out of the motor would be attached to a point on the triangle (internally, they may wind around a bit, but if you take them out that's what you'd have) -- or as a Y (each leg of the Y is a coil), and each wire coming out of the motor is attached to the end of one of the legs of the Y. The wires are not positive and negative per se, as the voltage on them is flipped back and forth by the ESC to get the right magnetic field in the motor at the right time; and may be simply called A, B, and C (or some other similar designation)
There are several advantages to brushless motors, but two of them are that you can push more power through a soldered wire connection than you can a brush without incurring power loss and excessive brush wear, and the computer in the ESC can vary the timing and current flow to match what the motor is actually doing at the time -- net result being more efficiency and higher power output from a given size of motor.
Also, I'm pretty sure that hooking up two brushless motors to one ESC is going to confuse the heck out of the computer in the ESC, especially as the motors get out of sync with each other. However, you can use 2 ESCs with 2 motors (one ESC per motor) with a simple servo Y cable. (note that one of the ESCs probably should not have it's positive power lead connected to the receiver; as you don't want the built-in BEC in the ESCs fighting - some will, some won't depending on the specific voltage regulator chips in the ESCs).
This PDF describes how to assemble your own brushless motor from parts: http://www.gobrushless.com/GBL_single_v2.pdf which, conveniently enough, they sell at http://www.gobrushless.com/
Posted February 7th, 2009 at 10:27 AM by hammerhead74k
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does anyone know how set up elevon mode on the dx5e 5 channel full range transmitter?
Posted June 11th, 2009 at 03:16 AM by mythbuster_128
