Saturday 25 January 2014

A crow brake enhancement for the Taranis

Recently I saw a discussion on one of the forums, about crow brakes - the poster was asking if there was a way to adjust crow-to-elevator compensation in flight. I thought this would be a pretty useful feature to add to my F3F setup.

Fortunately this kind of thing is well within the capabilities of the Taranis - the question is not how to implement it, but how to make it intuitive for the pilot.

My solution puts the compensation adjustment on the throttle trim. It works in a similar sense to the elevator trim, i.e. clicking forward causes the model to pitch down. In practice, you'd apply full crow, watch for any signs of pitch up or down, and adjust the trim accordingly. For cases where crow/pitch is non-linear, a curve can be edited for fine tuning the mid-crow response.

The adjustment is included in F3F setup V2.03. This means the pilot now has five adjustments to play with for trimming out a model. I've emphasis this, because for routine flying (and during a competition), the only thing the pilot needs to operate - apart from the sticks - is the main flight mode switch. Flexibility need not come at the expense of simplicity.


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