Post Build
IMPORTANT: Remove all propellers from the plane before doing these final adjustments! (Especially
the tail motor's propeller!)
Center all Servo Channels and Controls
On your transmitter ensure all the channels' sub trims and trims tabs are centered.
Plug in the plane and bind the plane.
If any
of the control surfaces are not properly centered (they should be by now, but…) use your subtrim
function on your transmitter to center them.
NOTE: This is not ideal, but if you got this far and it's off
you would have to break the CA/Z-Bend connections to fix it mechanically. Your choice is to sub trim or
redo the pushrod(s).
Once centred using subtrims you can adjust trim using the trim tabs during flight.
Tail Rotor Subtrim / Centering
You may notice that when you plug in and bind your plane and apply power to the tail rotor that it starts
to turn or jitter. This is normal. It just means that your transmitter's output on the channel you plugged
the tail ESC into is not perfectly at 1500 us (center value of Spektrum/JR type radios).
To resolve this simply go into the settings on your radio and adjust the SubTrim value for the tail ESC's
channel up or down until the motor consistently does not move.
Typically what I've done is trim one way until it spins and note the value. Then go the other direction
until it once again spins and note that value. Then I pick a value in the middle of that as a starting
point. This gives an even swing on both sides when flying as to when the motor will start up.
Program Tail Rotor Mixing
The tail rotor mixing is / should be fairly straight forward. The prototype was flown off a Spektrum DX8
with a basic 6 channel receiver. Any 5+ channel receiver and programmable radio should work fine
though.
Plug the tail rotor's ESC lead into a spare channel on the receiver. In our case we used the AUX1
(flap) channel which was ch6.
In the Spektrum DX8 radio System menu -> Switch Select we set the "L Trim = AUX1". This was
required for the DX8's mix configs to be able to address the channel.
Now for the mix settings you want to simply mix 100% rudder to the chosen channel (AUX1 in our
case). You probably want to also enable/disable that mix based on a switch as well. That way, you
can turn the tail rotor on and off during flight.
On the DX8 it kind of looks like this in the settings menu's Mixing settings:
