Helicopter and Cat Feeder Mods Today

2013-04-26 21:28 - Making

Today I almost perfectly completed two little DIY mods.

First, to a toy helicopter. My favorite model has removable batteries and an external charger, and I've gotten extra batteries so a charged one is always ready when I'm in the mood. My second favorite is the cheaper sort, with a hard-wired battery, which must be tethered to charge. So it ends up fly a few minutes, charge an hour .. fly a few minutes, charge an hour .. repeat.

I took a spare landing skid for the favorite model, which includes the connector and holder for the battery, and attached it to the bottom of the other model. This moved the weight of the stock battery, near the nose, to the middle. So I also removed the purely decorative (I thought!) tail boom to balance the weight out. This worked well. But the side effect was to move a fair deal of weight from the outside to the inside. It seems the gyro system doesn't deal with this now, the corrections it make work too fast, and it jitters in the air. If I replace the tail boom it hovers cleanly, but it can hardly move forward anymore, because it's off balance.

Second, I did a complete DIY mod to my automatic cat feeder, to operate off of wall current rather than batteries that always need replacing. This mostly worked fine. The idea was old, I had it back when I was using the previous (now broken and replaced) model in this line. But the new model has a totally flat bottom; the extra cord sticking out has it just slightly off balance. Oh, and it's got a jack to plug an A/C adapter into on the side! I think the old model didn't have that. So this could have been much easier!

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