Thursday, March 31, 2011

Flight simulation

While I'm waiting for my battery parts to complete my home made LiPo battery and while I'm waiting for a calm day to fly, I've been playing with my new flight simulation setup.
I was originally going to purchase the E-sky 4 channel controller because it was so inexpensive (~$20) and I did not want to spend too much money to get started.  While shopping for this I stumbled across a similar product from Dynam.  This product comes with a 6 channel controller (usb connection to computer) and the same FSM software as E-sky.  Not only did it come with more functions but is was cheaper too (~$14)!  So for about $32 I purchased two from HobbyPartz.com (they had free shipping for orders over $25).  I bought one for me and on for my Dad.

I was a little disappointed that it did not come with the software on CD but it is a free and relatively small download from their site on the Internet.  The instruction are relatively simple as well and within minutes I had this up and running on my laptop computer.  What a Blast!

The scenery isn't the greatest, but it's adequate, and more importantly the flying seems realistic.  It is a little kludgey in that planes without landing gear must be hand launched and will slowly sink their tails into the ground and the trees look like two sheets of cardboard joined together and stood up in an x shape.  But for this price, who cares.

From some searching around I found out that this is an open source project started by a couple of guys in Europe and that it is compatible with scenery and planes from other programs.  I will see what I can do to add some of those to my installation.

For now it does have the Hawk Sky (made by Dynam and what the Wild Hawk was patterned after) and it seems good enough.

I'll have more soon.

Thanks for stopping by my blog and please post comments, good or bad.  Be sure to come back and check for future posts.

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Mr. Clean