I finally took the plunge and started to upgrade my HobbyZone Super Cub R/C airplane with ailerons. This will let me do lots of new aerobatics, including rolls, the split-S, Immelmans, Cuban 8’s, and others. I’ve photodocumented the process for your enjoyment.

This weekend I upgraded my HobbyZone Super Cub R/C plane to use the Spektrum DX6 radio. I started by tearing out all the proprietary HobbyZone electronics. This includes the big black box (which is a receiver and speed controller), and the slow, huge ParkZone servos. To replace them, I used two of the four servos […]

I finally got the X-port drop module for my HobbyZone Super Cub and took to the skies with a parachute man on-board. Here’s a small video of his decent. The quality isn’t that great, so my apologies.

I recently wrote a Qt-based application in C++ that relies heavily on the QGraphicsView framework that made its first public appearance in Qt 4.2. QGraphicsView has been the target of some criticism for poor performance. I am a long-time user of Qt3’s QCanvas class which served me very well, in performance terms, but that lacked […]

I bought a pair of Dubro snow skis from my local hobby shop and strapped them on my R/C Hobbyzone Super Cub today. We got about 6 inches of snow yesterday and I took to the flying field today. I was only able to get up in the air from a rolling (or sliding) take […]

My friend Steve (who has appeared on this blog before) took his newly built GWS Tiger Moth R/C plane out for its maiden flight today after about 15 hours assembling it. His very first flight lasted only 4 seconds, and resulted in disaster. After hand-launching it, the plane climbed at too steap of an angle, […]

Parsing XML is fun again with Xerces progressive scan. Do you have large XML files that you need to parse in your GUI application? Are you sick of your XML parser blocking the event loop while it laboriously parses all that XML? Don’t waste another day! Xerces-C++ progressive scan was made for you, my friend.

After a few solid crashes with my new RC plane, I noticed that its battery box started to come loose. It’s a HobbyZone Super Cub, and even a semi-rough landing on thick grass can cause it to come loose. Read on for pictures and an explanation of how I solved the problem.

Through painful personal experience, I’ve learned the best techniques for freeing your RC airplane from the evil clutches of mother nature’s best weapon against pilots: trees. Read on and I’ll share with you the pearls of wisdom that helped me libreate my HobbyZone Super Cub after 3 long days of arboreal bondage.

I strapped my Kodak EasyShare C340 camera to the side of my HobbyZone Super Cub today and flew over Grandview Park in Provo, Utah. You can skip the first 1.5 minutes or so. I was taping the camera to the plane during that time. This video features two loops and one death spiral that almost […]