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Favionics would like to announce the preorder availability of their latest product, nanoAlt.
nanoAlt is the smallest, lightest, lowest power, highest resolution and largest recording capacity altimeter module on the market today! nanoAlt was designed for a variety of applications where space and weight are highly restricted such as FAI and other FreeFlight classes. The power consumption of nanoAlt has been designed so it can run off the smallest power sources available today, including watch coin cells or even solar cells.
nanoAlt specs:
– size: 9mm x 15mm x 3mm
– weight: 0.8g
– recording capacity: 43min @ 9Hz
– power supply: 3.4V-6V
– power consumption: 580uA
– resolution: 10cm (19bit)
– samples @ 9Hz (9 samples per sec)
– records altitude & temperaturehttp://www.favionics.com/Favionics/nanoAlt.html
Bill
There are 3 other altimeters that provide similar information. Rene’s is the smallest and collects ts the most data with the finest resolution. These are different from those that just give the max altitude. For free flight whats more interesting is to be able to observe the sink rate and climb rate at different parts of the climb rather than just the max altitude. The other 3 can be used with specific PC program or a “universal” program written by well known Finnish F1B sportsman Tapio Linkosalo and a friend for the Palm Pilot. This is what most people use on the field. This graphs the data but you can get reading at any point.
I understand that Rene is going to work with Tapio so his altimeter would work with this too.
Being a [but not the] MAC Bigot Rene wrote his own equivalent to this program that runs on an i-phone .
Roger
Thank you Roger, can i hire you as my press guy? 😉
Bill, Roger is correct, Tapio is adding support for my nanoAlt to his AltitudeAnalysis Palm program as we speak. I have a link to it on the nanoAlt page.
I know the documentation on my altimeter is a bit thin at the moment but we are working on it.
The operation is very similar to the the other altimeters. You power up (or reset) the altimeter right before you want to start, this calibrates the unit to the location and temperature you launch from. There is a user-selectable threshold that you can set, and the unit will only start recording once it passed that threshold. It buffers the previous 2 seconds so for F1B, if you set that threshold to let’s say 10m, you will record your entire flight including launch. for F1A this threshold is usually set to 55m.
Once the flight is finished, you can connect the nanoAlt to your display device of choice and view the altitude recording and inspect it. There are ways to point at a certain part of the graph and see what the altitude was and the sink rate around that segment of the graph.
I will post more on this soon.
Dear guru,
say your opinion about this altimeter:
http://www.adrel.com.pl/altimeter.html
Just a third of competitor’s price!I’ve used the M&K altimeter for some time– it is designed for use with the M&K timer and so, I believe, can not be used as a stand alone unit. One feature I do like is the IR link– ie no cable hook up. Point the Palm at the timer and in 1-2 seconds all the data is down loaded and stored on the Palm. I’ve down loaded up to 10 flights. The SW provides tabluated height (feet or meters) and time or a graphical represenation. The time vs height curve can be zoomed in and points interogated for time and height. If the model DTs, the SW extrapolates and provides a predicted time to the ground.
As Roger stated, once you get past the trill of seeing how high you get, the real value is examining glide rates (or climb for F1B).
Andrew Barron did Holiday on Ice a year or two ago and spoke to the winner (sorry I forgot his name) who explained that after many test flights, he determined the minimum sink for a long F1A (I believe M&K long model- airfoil) was at faster glide speed than “normal”.
At the Max Men, Victor Stamof show me his new circuit board– rather large but it will do it all, timer (Number of servos?), voltage step up, transmitter and GPS. I asked if it would have voice commands– not this version, many the next?
Thanks for solid reply!
Wait for Stamov’s back from US- my neighbor- will see the new “toy for the boy”.
Undoubtedly altimeter needed for training/ trimming. Also e-timer instead of mechanical for F1B.
Now is the stage of “homework”…
Thanks again!“At the Max Men, Victor Stamof show me his new circuit board– rather large but it will do it all, timer (Number of servos?), voltage step up, transmitter and GPS. I asked if it would have voice commands– not this version, many the next?”
We need polyphonic bleeper tones as well ! Maybe I’ll write an iPhone App for it ………………
CHE
Jim,
i have attached 2 images of the timer (Favionics FX10) so you can study it some more 😉 (Favionics develops this system for Victor). to answer your question, the feature set is:
5 servos
LED driver
Buzzer driver (10V)
Beacon driver
GPS
900MHz transceiver
Altimeter
5V voltage booster (operation from single lipo)
2MB Flash
built-in lipo charger (via USB)
wireless programing
wireless firmware update
Rene,
This is a very interesting development. A few questions :-
What is the size of the PCB ?
What programming devices will you use (is there an iPhone App for it yet) ?
Will it work with smart hooks ?
Thought of a good name yet (‘Red Lettice’ maybe) ?CHE
Chis,
> What is the size of the PCB ?
46x28mm> Will it work with smart hooks ?
of course! 😉> Thought of a good name yet (‘Red Lettice’ maybe) ?
the name is not as sexy as you suggest 😉 it’s called FX10Rene/ Allard,
Great work, does the FX10 also read temperature like your Nanoalt, if so the ingrediance are there to maybe look at another parameter/ ‘air speed indication’. Model and flyer performance analysis at accerleration phase!Temperature reading is pretty useless. Inside the pod it can heat up dramatically in direct sunlight. So the temperature curves as seen on the altimeter graphs are more of a gimmick than anything useful. It shows cooling and heating inside the pod rather than air temperature.
Unfortunately we couldn’t find space on the PCB for a second pressure sensor for pitot tube based speed measurements, although a stand alone unit has been designed (alti, speed, GPS, RCDT) for this purpose. Maybe in the future we can find a way to integrate speed as well, as it is the main parameter for speed to altitude conversion (efficiency). Please note that this is all prototyping stuff and needs massive time investment for firmware development and testing.ASC,
as Allard explained, the temp measurement isn’t of much use inside the pod. for outside mounted alti this maybe of use, but there the implicit pressure introduced by turbulence renders the alti itself useless.
our AviTrac GPS/RX/TX/Alti/Speed project features a 2nd pressure sensor for pitot use, but we haven’t actually used the pitot. we have yet to see the practicality of a pitot based speed measurement but maybe in future versions of FX10 we can add it.
Attached some pictures of our AviTrac project including iPhone GPS mapping of model flight and landing. You can see the 2 circular components, these are 2 pressure sensors, one for Altitude and one for Speed.
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