I finally decided to bite the bullet and buy an RC airplane so that I can start thinking more seriously about making a UAV someday.
In order to do a UAV, I’m going to need to understand a little more about motors, ESCs, servos, batteries, chargers, and all of that “RC” stuff. I think I have a pretty good handle on the IMU side of things; I can figure out the coding and wiring and hardware for the “brain” on my own (or, at least, at a later time).
I thought about building a Towel (Make Mag’s super simple RC airplane), and I thought about building a quadcopter, and both of those are probably in the long-term plan. But for now, I needed a nice, easy, toss-it-together-and-try-it kind of craft, and I decided on the HobbyKing Bixler. It was billed as having a lot of cockpit room for adding UAV electronics later, and also as a nice, easy trainer aircraft. The price is right, too — the plane showed up on my doorstep, ready to be hooked to my Tx/Rx gear, for $125.
I bought the ARF version, which required me to pick out an ESC, a battery, and a charger on my own (it came with motor, prop, and 4 servos). The order only took about 4 days (including a holiday weekend!) to turn up from the USA warehouse.
I spent some time test-fitting everything together last night; it goes together nicely, and it doesn’t look like I forgot anything.I’ll have to spend a little more time taping wires down, gluing on control surfaces, etc., but the kit gives me a lot of confidence that I’ll be able to put together a working model in very short order.
I’m going to use packing tape to seal the fuselage; I could use CA, but I have he sneaking suspicion that I’ll be diving back in there to add, replace, or otherwise mod the beast.
So, the plan is to get the plane constructed, make it fly a little, and then I can start working on adding an IMU.
Once I get my feet wet with this guy, I can start thinking about what motors to pick up for the quadcopter, or whatever the next step is.