The editor of the magazine I take, posted on the accompanying forum a little while ago explaining that some time back there was a free plan published for a model called the Foam Fing, to celebrate this they had a few of the foam boards printed up with their logo and the name of the model. A few of these had recently been found and an offer was made of a free board in return for the recipient designing a model for it.

One of the other guys on the forum has dug out the original plans and posted them to the thread, they can bee seen here.

This wasn’t an opportunity to miss so I signed up without giving it much thought. Things began to feel real last week however, when the foam board turned up in the post!

[]({{ “/uploads/2013/09/P1160576.jpg” | prepend: site.baseurl }})Its 6mm foam with card on each side, the sort of stuff Hobby Craft sell in quite large A3/A2 sheets for a few pounds.

I started to sketch some aircraft on paper and sort of started to be drawn to a canard. I sketched a few canards before coming up with what looked like a pretty little thing and with proportions that might work.   Figuring that a chuckie glider might at least make me feel more confident, I set about cutting balsa. The result can be seen here, which with a little nose weight seems to happily fly the length of the garden in a nice gentle glide path.

So there we are then, I have a board from RCM&E and three A2 boards I picked up from Hobby Craft at the weekend, and a chuckie glider which sees to fly ok.I want to crack on with the Beaver first, but a plan is forming in my head 🙂

A while ago I bought myself a FitBit One to keep an eye on exactly how much I walk, it is a little expensive for a pedometer, but I liked the fact it syncs via Bluetooth 4 to a supplied dongle or to an iPhone. The data can be viewed on the dashboard on their site but also - and this is one of the things which attracted me to the FitBit - via an API. I’ve had it for a good while now and figured it was time to start looking into the API.

The first thing I wanted to do was get the historic data and save it somehow. I’ve got that bit working, I have a php script which is authenticated against my account and requests a given days data which is then saved as raw json to a text file.

I’ve no plans to do anything with this data yet, so json in a text file suits me fine. I can read it with pretty much anything and it is easy to backup.

I’ve put the initial simple code up on GitHub which you can see here.

So a while back I managed to stuff my Edge 540 hitting the nose quite hard and breaking the prop. When I picked it up I noticed the rudder was all loose suggesting I had stripped the gears in the rudder servo.  No worries I thought, how could it be to find a new servo? Well the answer is, quite tough indeed!  The official part # is EFLR7100, I couldn’t find any UK stockists and going by the USD price I figured if I could find one it would likely be 20 quid or so which seemed a little steep.

After quite a search I found the TGY-D1290P from Hobby King, this fitted perfectly, even including the little JST connectors enabling it to connect directly to the AR6310 Spektrum RX which is supplied with the aircraft.  There is a handy extension cable buried in the fuselage, so the length of cable supplied with the servo is sufficient.

I’ve had four flights since replacing the servo, all good!

Well a little under 2 weeks after I started, I’ve finished the construction of the Beaver.  Last night I spent a good while giving it a thorough sanding to ensure there were no rough edges that would stick through the tissue, now she is ready for covering.

I’ve yet to decide what scheme to paint her in, I’ll possibly use the decals provided in the kit, but there are so many Beavers in nice colour schemes that is seems a shame not to try and emulate something a bit more colourful than the blue and white of the kit. I expect it’ll take me a while to get her covered up nicely so there is a bit of time to ponder! The picture below is her pinned together before the covering starts, I’m pretty pleased with how the build has turned out, lets hope I don’t make a mess of the covering!

For the last couple of years I’ve been making an effort to get to as many of the shows run by Model Air at Old Warden as possible, although what with moving house and the family, this year I only managed to get along to the last one of the year, the Festival of Flight in September.

Its always a bit of a gamble with the weather in September, but despite the 5 day forecast earlier in the week predicting thunder and lightning, the weekend turned out pretty nice. Saturday was a little windy - maybe 15mph, gusting to 20+ but the rain held off and the sun shone all day.   Sunday looks to have been the better day judging by the video below.

We visited on the Saturday, again taking my 3 year old with me who seems to enjoy wandering around and looking at planes, particularly enjoying all the stalls. Only the very bravest of the free flight brigade were out, but the RC and CL boys made up for it with pretty constant flying. Sunday looks to have been far better attended, thanks I imagine to the much calmer air. I shot a few pics while wandering around, they can be seen on the gallery page here.

Video thanks to wondefulcat:

A while ago I stopped using either Aperture or iPhoto to manage my photos and switched to Lightroom. Pretty much the only downside of switching was the lack of PhotoStream import. This lead to me having a bit of a poke around on the filesystem and see where the Apple products were getting the photos from.

It turns out that once you have installed either Aperture or iPhoto the iCloud system preference lets you enable PhotoStream support. What this actually happens in the background is some system service is enabled which downloads the photos into a directory under ~/Library.  I intended to keep Aperture installed, so I figured I could just write a short bit of code to walk this directory, pulling out photos and putting them into a directory of my choosing.

I’ve put the script up on git hub, which you can find here. Feel free to copy it and use it, drop me a line if you have any issues.

So I’ve started another build, this time though I’ve decided to build something smaller. I’ve got quite a few RC planes sitting around and I’m not getting much time to fly them, so that got me thinking: What could I build which would be enjoyable but wouldn’t either cost much, or take up much room.

After a bit of a ponder I hit upon the idea of a small rubber powered free flight model.  A bit of research and I happened on the lovely Guillows kit of the Beaver, an aircraft I’ve always thought pretty.

The build has only just started, with just a few formers being fixed to the central fuselage crutch, I’m uploading pics as I go to the gallery here. The pic below shows the left hand formers drying.