Going Electric, Tools you might need.

There are a ton of things to be concerned about when building a RC Helicopter, you need to make sure everything has loctite, pinions and gears mesh, links are a certain size, blades are balanced and track, and the list goes on.

Then there’s the electric powered heli. As easy as it is to set these you there are a few extra tools you need to make sure your heli doesn’t burn up a speed controller, a Lipo or the motor itself. I don't bother with the smaller 200 or 400/450 class helis but when you have 13 degrees of pitch on a 500 class you can easily comsume a lot of amps.

Here's a couple tools, Watt meters. E-Flite makes a Power Meter that support most of the common functions(Ammeter, Amp-hour meter, wattmeter, voltmeter, Watt-hour meter) I like this one because of the big easy to read digits.



Then there's the WATT's UP meter. This has the standard features like the E-Flite but shows all the readings on the screen. It lets you easily measure EIGHT electrical values that tell you what's really going on.



Finally my personal favorite EagleTree's eLogger and the supporting software. In addition to greatly enhanced resolution and accuracy, the V3 now supports voltage to 70 volts, current to 100 amps (150 amps optional), GPS (with optional GPS Expander), 4x the logging capacity of the V2, Three Temperatures, and Throttle Logging (or logging of two RPMs)! And now, you can connect the V3 to the data port of your Spektrum AR9000(TM) or JR R921(TM) Receiver to log and display RF Link performance data!


This is the elogger, with the brushless sensor and the powerpanel display.

Then with the supporting software you can down load flight information to you computer and play it back. You get to view all the vitals as they happened in the air. It also allows you to configure the software and powerpanel displays.