The
Eco PiccoloThe Eco Picollo is an itty-bitty electric RC helicopter that can be flown indoors and in your yard. It is made my the German company Ikarus.
I have had mine about 8 months now and have made several modifications to improve on it's performance. Most of the mods are ideas I've picked up from other modelers facing the same sets of problems.
Check out the avi movie below. It shows my Piccolo flying in Fast Forward Flight (FFF) in a breeze outdoors. I can't imagine flying a Piccolo in these conditions without mods....
fff.avi 3.2mb 352 x 240 Uses Mpeg 4 for compression.
Note: Some people have mentioned they are getting a "MP42 decompressor not found" message when they try to view the AVI files. That is the problem with those pesky "codecs". Codecs are the internal "code" used to decipher the compressed avi files. There's tons of them and you usually get a decent collection when you have a newer version of the Windows Media Player or a newer version of the operating system: WindowsME or Windows2000. Here is a site that will help you if you get the error: http://www.moviesoftware.net/codecs.html
Also, if you are interested in how I made this movie (more discussion of codecs) as well as others I have on this site then check out: Making Movies on the Internet
I don't have a large indoor flying area and my wife frowns on internal flights, so I am most interested in flying outdoors. Also, I don't want to have to wait until it is dead calm to fly. Therefore, I wanted to make the chopper a little more resistant to wind and gusts as well as improving it's forward flight capabilities.
Problems:
- The Piccolo is unstable in a light breeze or gust because of the large coning angle of the blades. This also effects it's ability to move very fast in forward flight. As a result it is necessary to beef up the rotor head and stiffen the blades in order to keep them 'flatter'.
- The original blades turn at too low an RPM. This doesn't cause any real problem when flying indoors or in a no-wind situation. The problem occurs when a little gust of wind picks up the helicopter and it rises suddenly. In order to descend you reduce power which further reduces rotor RPM. As the rotor RPM decreases the ability to control the helicopter with cyclic plummets. None of this would happen if we had collective pitch. The way around this is to cut the blades. This unloads them and they turn much faster. When you descend, the blades are still turning fast enough to keep good cyclic control. The faster rotor RPM also seems to control coning and increases stability too. The only drawback appears to be a larger propensity to 'float' in ground effect. This is where you are a few inches off the ground and the helicopter skitters around like a greased pig. You need to plop down onto the ground firmly and decisively. Also takeoffs should be decisive too. A drawback to high rotor speeds is the corresponding crash damage that occurs to the helicopter or anything else it hits.
The following pictures show the mods I have made to the main rotor head and blades:
Rotor head mods
Carbon fiber stiffener to bottom of rotor blades
Home-made Kevlar battery holder with Velcro. Also notice I have a TADIRANŽ
Lithium-Metal Batteries 9v battery pack.