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Special Interests

Aerial photography, telemetry, night flight, records,unusual models

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Suppliers | Micro models | Antiques | Aerial photography | Airships | Floats | Flying Wings | Full Size | Large models | Night flight | Ornithopters | Props:Smoke, bombs, whistles | Records | Scale | Solar-powered | Telemetry | UAVs | weird models | Skydivers | Helicopters

Links:

BalloonCraft RTF Electric R/C Blimp
Ebay store with nice lightweight blimps.
'Fly Electric' - Float Flying
A great article on designing, building and flying with floats.
$1.97 Floats - RC Groups
Step by step tutorial on building your own floats for a Slow Stik from foam board.
Skis and Floats
Float and ski builds and information. Lots of good info here.
Data - Free plans and great links on the web - RC Groups
Most of these are not electric, but this is a great list of plans and links to float planes and waterplanes.
AE-1 Silent
An early sailplane with an electric motor on a retractable boom
solair
German site for solar-powered full-size gliders.
RC Groups Discussion - 24 foot wingspan electric foam model
Almost a full-scale Cessna, built out of pink foam and a big, big motor. Wow.
'Fly Electric' - Large Electrics
A very long listing of large-scale electric models. Some great stuff here.
Scratch Built 203" A-380 within one month - RC Groups
This guy builds the most amazing large planes from styrofoam and vynil signfilm.
Predator
This is one of the largest electric motors available. 12.5 kW
RC Groups - Micro Thread Index
A great listing of micro info.
Plantraco's RTF Butterfly - Fly in your Livingroom!
A tiny indoor micro airplane.
Glowire Electroluminescent Wire
EL wire can be used to create spectacular night-flying schemes.
RC-CAM Projects: LED Calculator
A resistor value calculator for connecting your LEDS to a receiver for power.
Don's light, lamp and strobe site!
A comprehensive site with details on rigging up lighting systems using LED's and strobes, among others.
The Ornithopter Zone
Great info with links, projects, stuff to buy, and more.
RCU Magazine How-To - RC Smoke Smoke System
Article on adding a smoke system to an electric plane.
RCSmoke.com
The RC Smoke has earned a reputation all over the world for safety and reliability. A complete range of non-toxic smoke products are available for your personal sky writing needs in rich white or colored smoke.
New World Distance Records for Electric Powered Model Aircraft
Electric sailplane (continuous power): 54.3 km. Electric heli: 4.85 km.
World Altitude Record for an Electric Propelled, Radio Controlled Aircraft
2573 metres above launch point.
Doc-U-Link links for scale modelers
Doc-U-Link is designed with the scale modeler in mind. Doc-U-Link provides access to pre-qualified scale modeling resources on the web.
Scale Aero
A comprehensive, if confusingly laid out, site on scale modeling.
adventurelounge.com - Early Aircraft Design
Drawings taken from early patent applications for aircraft. Some scale ideas and lots of interesting, wacky designs.
The 2004 edition of Solar Splinter
Nice plane, but bad luck with the flights...
Laser powered aircraft
If you put the solar cells at the bottom, you can power an RC plane via a ground-based laser. Then you can keep it in the air for an unlimited time. Sounds like a great idea.
Eagle Tree
Telemetry and datalogging of flight commands and other conditions.
Electronics - Datalogger
A nice homebuilt datalogger for inflight logging.
MicroPilot Small UAV Autopilots
The MP2028g from MicroPilot is the world’s smallest full featured UAV autopilot. Capabilities include airspeed hold, altitude hold, turn coordination, GPS navigation, plus autonomous operation from launch to recovery.
Inter-Ex Overview
Inter-Ex is a contest for unusual, innovative designs. The real aim of Inter-Ex is to promote experimentation in model flying and the development of unusual flying objects by swapping experiences, ideas, suggestions and details of construction methods.
X-PERIMENTAL WINGS, le site !!
Experimental aircraft on show. Some really strange designs here.
Aerocon Systems Descent Rate Calculator
Given the mass and the area of the parachute, this handy calculator works out a rough descent rate for your parachute.
THE TED BERETS
Great site for making your own parachutes. Includes a calculator to create the chute shape.
German producer of skydivers
A good-looking radio control skydiver. Unfortunately, the site is in German.
SAM
The Society of Antique Modelers is dedicated to antique and old-timer planes, originally designed for free flight.
Lange Aviation
Lange Aviation builds manned electric gliders. Very impressive.
1000 Aircraft photos
Photos of 1000 aircraft. Great for looking for a next scale subject.
Remote Control Aerial Photography Association
RCAPA™ provides operational safety guidelines, best business practices, networking information and new technology information.
AeroFred - Micro Indoor RC Airplane Models and Accessories
AeroFred produces and sells exclusive and high quality micro indoor, peanut scale RTF and ARF model airplanes.
Project-Robotic Samara, Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory, Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland
The Automous Vehicle Laboratory in the Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland, where a mono-wing helicopter is being developed as a UAV.
Flying Green: The Possibilities And Challenges Of Electric Aircraft
Several new electric planes are being launched. Two of the most interesting planes to fly recently are the E430 and the SkySpark.
Aerosound RC Products
Realistic engine sounds using a player and speaker. Mostly larger scale models, since the system adds about 8 oz to the plane.
ArduPilot
ArduPilot is a full-featured autopilot based on the Arduino open-source hardware platform. It uses infrared (thermopile) sensors or an IMU for stabilization and GPS for navigation.
WowWee FlyTech Bladestar -- Engadget
Indoor flying toys aren't hard to come by these days, but WowWee's newest looks interesting.
DIY Drones
The largest amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) community on the web.
DEMENTOR building a home solar powered UAV
Interesting project. This is still in the beginning stage, but shows promise.
Festo AirJelly -- Engadget
We'd explain this thing, but we're really having trouble taking our eyes off of it long enough to string some full sentences together.
RC Lite Systems
RAM provides lighting systems that run off 9v batteries.
Super Bright LEDs – LED Lights, Bulbs, and Accessories
LED lights, components and LED products. All products are available for purchase online.
Flying boat design - Ivan's plans
Flying off water is fun, but there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind when converting a plane to floats.
Balsa Wood Airplanes - Toy Airplanes - Paul K Guillow Inc
Small, mainly free flight models. Some of these would be great micro rc models.
6.25g Micro Helicopter - RC Groups
6.25g Micro Helicopter: This is about as small as it gets.
Micro-UFO
A quadrotor microheli weighing in at 20 grams.
autopilot: Do it yourself UAV
Autopilot for model helicopters, with 3 axis IMU/INS GPS
Fly RC - Make Your Own Park Flyer Floats
These simple foam floats are very easy to make in an evening and are suitable for many lightweight park flyer type models.
How to make an actuator
How to make an actuator ( step by step )
Glow in the Dark
Glow Inc. provides glow in the dark paints, great for night flying.
Whimsical flyers
Whimsical flyers, mostly foam creations. They fly, but they sure don't look like airplanes!
Scale decals for downloading
Cool scale decals for downloading.
The Flying Giants
Large scale aerobatics.
plan 3-vues
3-views of loads of planes for scale modelling.
Plantraco's Micro R/C Online Catalog
Plantraco sells micro gear and planes
Thrust Vectoring Made Easy
Interesting modification to a foamy for motor thrust vectoring
Nurflugel
Flying wing mania. What can I say? Information on flying wings to keep you busy for a long time.
14 nights in the air
QinetiQ announced that it returned Zephyr, its solar powered high-altitude long endurance (HALE) Unmanned Air System (UAS) back to earth after two weeks in the air – smashing a number of long-standing official and unofficial world records.
Lazertoyz RC Light Systems
Good lighting systems.
Birdkit Store
Online store selling flapping-wing aircraft.
Sky-Sailor
This project started in 2004 under a contract with European Space Agency to study the feasibility of a Martian Solar Airplane. This system, named Sky-Sailor, is fully autonomous in navigation and power generation.
AliSport
Full-size electric assist gliders
Don's LED Main Page
Lots of info on LEDs
Record-setting electric plane tows glider up into the sky in seconds
Siemens has just announced that an electric aerobatic plane powered by its latest motor has nabbed two world speed records. The Extra 330LE electric test plane also became the first in the world to tow a glider up into the skies.
Indoor's page
Advice, plans and links to suppliers for micro models
Aerosound RC
Aerosound provides scale sound recordings and systems for scale aircraft.