Tails & Legs

So I got to try out the kite tails I got for my KAP setup. They're outstanding! I have yet to have one of my parafoils sail that well with so few nosedives. The surprising bit was the kite I had slated to loft the camera probably isn't the one I'll wind up using most of the time. The wind here is tricky, and with wind coming up and over a mountain as well as channeling down a wide valley, we get some oddball gusts and wind tunnel speeds. My little parafoil, the one I don't fly because it's even less stable than my big one, was the clear winner for behavior with the new tails, and it was able to lift a one liter water bottle without too much swaying or scary behavior.

I like the bigger kite for lower winds, though we don't get them that often. Have to keep experimenting.

Anyway, construction continues apace on the KAP rig. Rather than wait a week on the batteries, I'm going to pull out the servo code for the Orangutan and have it send some 1.5ms pulses out of one of its channels so I can center things up for alignment. (Sheepishly... I wrote some library code for driving up to eight servos off a little Orangutan controller, and totally forgot this when it came to centering the KAP's servos! DOH!) In any case this and some longer standoffs should let me finish the rig and get things wired up in anticipation of the new batteries.

Only one problem really remains. After being a little frustrated while working on the KAP rig, and after watching the water bottle tests out in the kite field yesterday, I'm convinced of the necessity of legs on this, my first KAP rig. So I sent another $20 off to Brooks Leffler for a leg kit. I kick myself as I do this, because adding legs would be a really straightforward thing to do in the shop. But dang it, he makes pretty parts that clearly have years of thought and testing put into them, and for $20 I get black anodized leg brackets and carbon fiber legs. I'm not going to knock it. (Besides, my own 0.240" CF spar is slated to be a mast for an RC sailboat I'm working on... I'd have to order more, anyway.)

So still no pictures, but lots more healthy respect for his design work. In any case I got the receipt from All-Battery, and figure the batteries and the legs will ship on Monday. I should have a working rig by next weekend.

Tom