Flapperons

Hello all,

Since I now have a programmable transmitter and an airplane with ailerons in need of flaps, I decided to see what it would take to setup flapperons.  My initial installation of ailerons consisted of flaps cut into each wing with servo to operate each one and a "Y" cable to connect both servos to channel one on the receiver.  One servo was installed apposed to the first one so that they in effect move opposite of each other.  This proved to be a perfectly usable way to run ailerons and is easy to trim.  As there is no room to add flaps with another set of servos, it seemed reasonable to try setting up mixing to accomplish this.

Cutting out the Y adapter

Both connectors cut out

New aileron extensions installed

The first thing I needed to do was to cut out the "Y" cable that I had glued in.  Each of the split connectors were glued, one into a cutout in each side of the fuselage.  Once these were removed I replaced them with regular extensions.  One of these would go into channel 1 and the other would go into channel 6.  Channel 1 would then be mixed with channel 6 and channel 6 set for reverse direction.  Then switch B would be mixed with channel 1 and then again with channel 6.  Since channel 6 had been reversed for aileron control the mixing of switch B would also need to be reversed.

HK T6A V2 6 channel transmitter

As I have a Hobby King T6A V2 2.4GHz 6 Channel transmitter, this required the use of the T6Config software.  Now I have to say that this isn't the greatest software but it is functional.  The first time I used it, it worked just fine and I was able to reverse my elevator servo and play with a few other settings.  Well, that was some time ago and I have not needed it since.  This time when I started up the software I was unable to get the software to work with the programming cable.  Each time I selected the com port (4 in this case, oh, and even though this is a USB cable, it appears as a serial connection) the software would freeze up.  I suspect this is due to software updates that have broken the old driver.  It took a while but I was finally able to find the link to the USB cable site and download the latest driver.  With this new driver all was working fine again.

On to the software settings.  The following show the actual settings used to accomplish the mixing that I  mentioned above.

Mix 1 causing channel 6 to follow channel 1

Mix 2 adding channel 1 to switch B

Mix 3 adding channel 6 to switch B 

There are others who have rate settings for mix 2 and 3 set as low as 10 and as high as 75.  I thought I would use 50% so as  to give more room for experimenting.  In this case, 50% gives 50% down when applied and still leaves another 50% of down for ailerons.  Note also that mix 3 is -50% as this servo is reversed for aileron control.  Also note that with this particular transmitter, as the dials are associated with the switches, VR B will also affect the amount of flaps (adjust how much of the 50% is applied).  Just as a side note, my channel 5 is switch A, and I left that setup as a throttle cut off.  This is a whole other story as to how well that works with a stick programmable brushless speed controller.

In testing, all of this worked as planned!  Unbelievable that it worked on the first try.  This seems to never happen for me.  I am a happy camper.

Flapperon testing

So, now it's off to see how it flies!

Thanks for stopping by my blog.  Please feel free to post comments, good or bad, and be sure to come back and check for future posts.