Flight 3: Actual Great Success!

Location: Bellomy Field

Date: 6/26/09

Plane: Parkzone Radian (with new carbon reinforced fueselage)

Conditions: 2-3 mph w/ 5mph gusts, wind in total random directions

Battery: Started full (12.56V), ended at 11.3V (2100Mah 3-Cell Thunder Power Pro-Lite V2)

Modifications to Fueselage:

A new fuselage was recieved, and reinfoced with carbon fiber rod where the previous fuselage was shown to be weak.

Notes:

Today was overall a great day of flying! Flight duration was approximately 30-45 minutes, I should have paid more attention or reset the timer on my transmitter to get actual flight times. Once the plane was properly trimmed (Trimming is difficult without a neck-strap) it flew stable like a charm. Thrown takeoffs were easy, and once in the air the plane seemed highly affected by wind gusts. The wind gust direction was completely random causing some difficulty. I was able to catch my first thermals off the parking lot adjacent to the field, they were quite constant and I was able to fly without power for probably 5 minutes or longer, however, this resulted in some overconfidence in my part and resulted in a stall and near crash in the Leavey Center parking lot later when I was flying at low altitude. Also I practiced landing and found it a bit harder with the wind than I had practiced with the simulator. I found myself coming in too high and way too fast, which ended up with me performing swirls to land. I believe this resulted from my fear of flying to far away to get a good approach. There were no crashes, and the plane was nicely in tact!

Flight 2: Titanic Proportions of suck

Location: Baylands Park

Date: 5/21/09

Plane: Parkzone Radian

Conditions: Windy (too much)

Crash Results:

Notes:

It was too windy for my nimble novice thumbs to handle. My handy assistant Kirsten helped my hand launch the plane and the wind instantly took it into the trees resulting in an epic fail crash.

First Flight! Great Success! (slight scratches)

Location: Bellomy Field

Plane: (Brand New) Parkzone Radian

Conditions: 3-4 mph winds with 8 mph gusts.

Notes:
Flying for the first time was nerve wracking, and I had absolutely no control! I hand launched the plane with way too much throttle like a fighter jet from a battleship, and way overcompensating on the controls, I was doing some serious acrobatic flips, hoopla's, and what have yous just trying to keep the thing from piledriving into the ground with erratic throttling. The wind was no help either, and trying to slow things down I crash landed by catching the wing tip on the ground, everything was fine that time.

Pulling myself together I went for another try. Thought I would use much less throttle, and be gentle with the controls, the Radian is a very responsive plane! This time using very little throttle on the launch, I was able to have much better control of the plane, and I was able to even cut the throttle completely and fly into the wind, this is where I realized that the Radian can fly with absolutely no throttle whatsoever. When flying into the wind the controls extremely responsive, and with only a slight jog of the controls the plane flips completely around and zooms away! I felt much more under control this time, though I still had issues decoding in my brain what controls to enact in order to get it to do what I wanted when the plane is in different orientations, i.e. I always turned the wrong way when flying towards myself or at weird angles. Landing this time I was able to throttle off and glide towards myself which was into the wind, come close to the ground, and again turned the wrong way since I was flying towards myself and caught a wingtip resulting in a gracious crash.

There were a few more flights similar to the last one, and one of them had a picture perfect landing. During the last flight the wind really picked up, and I couldn't control the plane. I would try to fly into the wind, but with a small jog of the controls it would flip completely around real fast and pick up serious speed. The elevators also had high sensitivity when flying into the wind, and a few times I found myself flying near vertical. I decided to try and bring the plane in for a landing, and while coming in low with the wind I was having a heck of a time keeping control, and as mentioned earlier, my slow brain works backwards sometimes, and I did a 10 foot piledrive crash during the approach, resulting in the image above.

The break is clean, so I will probably go to the hobby store to get some balsa wood spars for reinforcement.

So now, I will pick myself up, dust my sleeves off, glue this thing back together, and fly again another (not so windy) day.

STM32 w/ 14pin JTAG RLINK connector

This is my STM32 schematic which uses a 14-pin JTAG connector since my board is so small I have absolutely no room for 20-pin. Please check that the pinout is ok to match the RLINK 14-pin adapter, pinout for rlink is located here: http://www.raisonance.com/Forum/punbb/viewtopic.php?id=2449

Diptrace PCB Design Software Review

Diptrace 1.40
http://www.diptrace.com
Rating: Two Thumbs Up!
Diptrace is a full featured software package for PCB design, layout, and manufacturing. It has all the features one would expect, along with many advanced features such as autorouter, autoplace components, DRC (Design Rule Check), electra / spectra integration and much more.

The Selling Point:
I'll cut to the chase - Diptrace's functionality and user interface are the most intuitive and easy to use out of any other PCB software. Note that easy does not mean novice or beginner, but you can tell that the producers of this software have identified the flaws of many other programs. I've used numerous other PCB (Printed Circuit Board) Design programs including the "widespread" EAGLE and "industry standard" ORCAD, and while having access to all these, diptrace is now my default. Diptrace has the feel of a modern Windows XP era program that we've all come to love, not a ported-unix eyesore.

PRO'S

• User Friendly
• Intuitive Interface that is appealing and easy on the eyes.
• Pattern Based Footprints
• Cost Effective
  
• Auto Place Components
• Effective auto router included
• Commercial auto-router integration
• Time Saving Features
  
• Customer Support
  

Bragging Rights:
FOOTPRINTS
In most PCB CAD packages, nothing annoys more than the tedious task of making footprints, especially when you get in the 100+ pin footprints that are completely symmetrical, and you have to manually place every pad. Low and behold the first innovation of Diptrace I discovered, PATTERNS IN FOOTPRINTS! Heres an example for making a 100 pin TQFP: you input the pad dimension for all the pads which are the same, then specify pitch, number of pins, and a square pattern, spacing, and you're done! It takes 20 seconds - Incredible! In Eagle I would have to place every pin individually and tediously to get it right. Another great feature I loved was the ability to rename pins in an array fasion. You can select the pins in your footprint and renumber them (and add prefixes / postfixes) by rows descending, horizontally, any way you want. Also, you can separate you footprint into different layers much like you would if photoshop for organization and editing. Its convenient to place silkscreen outlines on new layers.

COMPONENTS
As with the footprints - you have the same luxury of creating them using pattens, then when connecting the components to the footprints, Diptrace automatically recognizes that pin1 connect to eachother - and visually displays this with a ratsnest. Pins were also easy to name using the pin array names - for example portD on a microcontroller, I could select all the pins and use array names to prefix them with "PORTD" then label them descending if they were in that order, giving me PORTD0,PORTD1, and so on... Once again very intuitive, seamless, and most importantly time saving.

SCHEMATICS
Once again Diptrace presents a great intuitive user interface for laying out your schematic - most importantly however you want to do it. They include nice sheet templates for ANSI and ISO that you can use, and you can spread your schematic over multiple pages which are easy to flip through like you would excel spreadsheets - not using separate windows or files or menus. The component libraries that you make are easy to access - along with the extensive libraries of 50,000 parts already included. Its convenient that the schematics are easy to update when you make changes to parts without having to delete and rewire everything by right clicking on individual parts - or updating all parts associated with a library or the entire schematic. The Electrical Rule Check proved very useful, and performed much better than eagles and easier to configure. One thing I hate about eagle is the constant need to manually "redraw" the screen after making changes to get chages out of the way - this is not present in Diptrace and it works like you would expect it to. Also for those doing high-end designs and needing to do analysis, Diptrace contains spice parameters for components and can export a spice netlist for doing analysis.

PCB LAYOUT
It was a pleasure laying out my board using Diptrace - as it should be. After creating my schematic with 250 components and 600 pins, I hit "convert to PCB" and it takes me to the PCB program where my components are nicely spread out and ratsnested together with light blue lines. The first thing to do is define the boundaries of your board, which you can make any shape, but you can also specify "rectangle 4x6"" or define coordinates through a dialog. Also if you're not sure how big to make your board you can use the "arrange components" feature to neatly and quickly organize them in a compact manner. The first thing to do is place your absolute components such as connectors and "lock" them. Now you can use the effective "auto-place" feature to place the rest of the components in an efficient way. Another bonus is the smooth integration with electra / spectra autorouters. The included autorouter is by far better than Eagle's, and will route simpler layouts, but putting 250 components and 600+ pins on a 9 square inche 2 layer board requires a separate professional routing package, which diptrace integrates nicely with. One of the most time saving features with the PCB program is the ability to update single components or the entire board from the schematic. Many packages have a hard time when you change the schematic or can't compensate at all and you are stuck. Diptrace was 100% effective at being up to date with the schematic. Once again the Design Rule Check met all my manufacturing requirements and the board I made went through without troubles.

CUSTOMER SUPPORT
I emailed tech support with a question, and received a response within hours that was insightful and friendly. They also have a forum where they are active an participate. A++

TIPS
Go through the tutorial provided which will point out how to use many of the time saving features and get you jump started.

CONCLUSION
Diptrace offers everything you need for PCB schematic capture and layout in a single streamlined economical package that costs pennies to its competitors. It has a fantastic modern user interface and time saving features. Commitment to PCB design software is large as you invest lots of time to making libraries and schematics, and Diptrace will not disappoint. It should exceed your expectations, and will save you lots of valuable Time.

RATING
TODDS TWO THUMBS UP!