Typhoon 3D

Chad Albrecht — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 10:24:00 GMT

After a 15 year sabbatical from RC planes, cars and helicopters, I broke down and bought an aerobatic RC plane. I told myself, It will be great for the kids! Did I honestly believe that? While I think at some point I'll build a trainer transmitter setup, right now, this is my toy.

Mostly by accident, I ended up with the Typhoon 3D by Parkzone. This is due to my need to buy whatever my local hobby shop had in stock. While definitely not a trainer, this plane is good for me for a few reasons:

Low cost, $180 for everything I need to fly.
Low cost replacement parts, because I'm going to crash a lot.
Easy to repair foam parts, because I'm going to crash a lot.
Long battery life 10-12 minutes, if I don't crash it first.
Full 4 channel radio. This means once I relearn how to fly, I can fly just about anything.
Trainer port on the transmitter so I can teach my kids to fly.
Trainer port interfaces with a simple cable to the PC for flight sim.

With those points in mind, let’s just say the first 4 points were very applicable to my initial flights. The following video is not me, but the plane and the results are the same.

Wanting to save some money, I though it would be a good idea to fly my plane in a simulator. A friend at work had introduced me to Flying-Model-Simulator (FMS) a while back and now was a good time to really use it.

First order of business was to find, or build, a FMS model of the Typhoon 3D. I quick Google search yielded exactly what I was looking for. I followed the FMS instructions for adding a model (drop files into the model directory) and I was in business!

Flying the Typhoon in FMS using the keyboard for a few minutes wasn’t doing it for me. I realized I needed to be able to use my transmitter as an input to FMS. Let me assure you that it was a bit challenging discovering how to do this. Let me just fill you in on the end result.

Go to the SmartPropoPlus Homepage and click on Cables. Scroll down to Mono Jack and click JR. This is the cable you need, a simple 3.5mm male to male mono cable. Once you have this in hand, download and install SmartPropoPlus for FMS as directed on the site. Connect your transmitter to the PC using the cable above. Finally, click on Step-by-Step and follow the directions for SmartPropoPlus for FMS. In the "Connecting your R/C Transmitter" step setup SmartPropoPlus set the Modulation as follows in the SmartPropoPlus Console:

Your audio source will depend on where you have the cable plugged in on your PC. I have mine plugged into my microphone port and it works great! Make sure to run the various Calibration steps outlined in the Step-by-Step on the SmartPropoPlus homepage. Good Luck!

Hobbies

Typhoon 3D