How to lock in your championship status for years. Well if you take your cue from the inventor of CL, you patent it. Electronics allows great opportunity for innovation. Currently CLPA, uses a rather primative form of electronic speed control. A person with the proper education or access to electrical and computer engineering, can develop a motor control system that monitors motor rpm, load, battery charge, temprature, motor temp, in real time. This data can then be used to dynamically adjust motor rpm to provide the exact thrust required as the model flys through any manuver, during any atmospheric condition, compensating for wind, angle of attack, battery drain, loss of motor efficency due to heat up, etc.

Design it specifically for CLPA use and copyright the software and patent the design and hardware. Then with the technical advantage others woul have great difficulty duplicating, learn to fly a killer pattern, and you could be a shoe in for every competition for years to come. Smart electronics can provide enormous advantages, just be the first and lock yourself in. Then when you tire of competition, you can sell licenses to use the technology to the rest of the CLPA community. I bet they will be standing in line.

The only problem will be reconciling the BOM rule cause no one figured on this.

It just higlights that electrics need to be judged in a seperate class. To take this one step further, since esc settings, and configuration, are specific to the person creating that specific combination of settings they can copyright that combination of settings. Just like a composer can copyright a specfic sequence of notes. Then no one else can use that specific combination / sequence of settings without permission. Anyone found doing so is in violation of copyright law. And it is very easy to copyright material.

Thus is life in the electronic / computer world.

Yes, and I'm going to start a new Rubber Stunt class.. (Let me know when Elvis arrives.)

Peter, your notion is interesting and I share a lot of interest in the technology involved, simply to construct some kind of servo for motor RPM, a feedback controller mechanism with many external inputs. Likely it would involve multiple control loops, with summers, gain blocks, differentiators and integrators.. and of course, we'd take the standard (poor) idea of implementing it all with a digital processor, for easy tweaking. Somehow the processor would keep up, without introducing enough lag to induce oscillation..

Assuming that all worked out as planned, we could spend the next 27 years tweaking and evaluating the system, trying to determine if there were improvements in the "pattern flying".. After all that, we'd either expire or become dang good fliers from all the practice!

Then we could copyright our control loop structure and all coefficients!

Oh yeh, and knowing the market for CL Stunt, well a small division of CL Stunt, we'd get rich selling the mechanism to others..

This is the part of the dream where you wake up, just as your car is driven off the cliff, and be grateful it was only a dream.. 

L.

PS - I'd simply like to map the difference in the input parameters for what we call a "good" flight versus a "bad" flight.

PPS - check out the Journal of Computer and Electrical Engineering and similar other sources for serious papers addressing control systems.

And let me know when Elvis arrives.. 

L.

"You've no idea of what a poor opinion I have of myself, and how little I deserve it." -W.S. Gilbert

I'm pretty sure one can make a pretty decent simulation of many control systems at a generic level using a common spreadsheet.

And one could pretty well calculate expected inputs for certain input parameters (say 3-axis accelerometers for a given flight path) and motor/battery characteristics could be pretty well quantified. The specifics of the propellor and ship aerodynamics would seem to me to be much more difficult to simulate..

That's why I'd love to start with a bunch of comparative data from actual flights, with a method to grade the quality of the flight associated each data set.

Maybe we actually will find that a CL Stunt pilot can be replaced with an op-amp, a few resistors and capacitors, and some clamp diodes?

L.

"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing." -Salvador Dali

So very true. I share two patents for telemetry equipment (5016005 and 5227783) and neither has yielded any monetary value to me. There have been multiple violations which would have cost a fortune to try to prosecute, further nearly all of our patents were obsolete within a couple of years, and it took about 3 years to finally get the patents.. ;->

As the patent attorney told us, there are many, many patents which practically are worth little or nothing, and a handful of them which are extremely valuable. Most of the big companies get patents on every passing thought, mostly as a means protecting themselves from lawsuits.

There's a story (perhaps urban legend) about the Radio Shack TRS-80 and its built in operating system/BASIC interpreter program. Supposedly there was a court fight over the actual ownership of some portion of the code, and after much hoo hah about simple changes in code segments to make them functionally equivalent but "different" enough to avoid copyright infringement, the case suddenly got settled. A new TRS-80, certified purchased at the local Radio Shack and kept locked as evidence was presented and turned on. The plaintiff pressed a couple of multiple key combinations and his NAME suddenly appeared on the screen.. "Not my code, eh??"

I don't know how true that is, but I can tell you that when I worked at Datapoint in San Antonio in 1975, there were some deliberate "mistakes" built into the schematics, e.g. a few address and data lines scrambled for the ROMs containing the microcode (it had a proprietary RISC processor). Thus a simple dump of the ROMs would be difficult to back engineer. There was also a special "combination lock" state machine which had to be run to access code with the monitor, and that was undocumented externally.

Nowadays most of the hardware devices used (say gate arrays) have special lock out features which make them difficult to back engineer. However, nothing is completely safe, and I have heard tales of microscopic observation of the chip circuitry as it operated to figure out its architecture.

I've done a bit of hacking on the TRS-80 ROM image myself. TRS-80s used software keyboard encoder scheme which included a debounce function. Virtually all mechanical switches bounce, and a standard debounce method is to read the switch image, wait a period and read it again. This is repeated until two or more consecutive images are identical. The problem was that the debounce delay was too short, and as soon as the keys got a bit of wear, key bounce became a real problem. I (and others, I'm sure) fixed that problem by changing a single byte controlling the delay. While I was changing the ROM, I removed the startup Tandy Radio Shack copyright message and changed the OK> prompt to By Your Command> (we were big fans of cylons in Battlestar Galactica in those days). Anyway, I made this change and the keyboard fix on my own computer, as well as several friends'..

Just before Tandy stopped selling Model I TRS-80s they had a huge sale of "parts" for them, including keyboard/motherboards, which were snapped up for something like $15 apiece (missing ROMs, of course). People started rolling their own TRS-80s and maybe a year later someone brought one by and showed it to me. It prompted By Your Command>, which I found mildly satisfying.

Many of us have good ideas and think about getting patents/copyrights, along with future royalty checks. It's almost always fantasy, unless you are an up and coming rapper.. And even then, look at how difficult and costly it is to "protect" your intellectual property, particularly in this information age.

I don't mean to discourage anyone from inventive and creative thinking. Quite the opposite. And it's still possible to have wild success. Look at facebook and a dozen other familiar things (which aren't all that clever to my thinking..) But realize if facebook was confined to only the entire universe of control line fliers, it would never be worth hundreds of millions. Fer sure..

One satisfying way to handle many creative urges is to pursue them for the simple pleasure of learning, and share them freely with others of similar dispositions. You see that going on here a lot.

L.

"Unix *is* user friendly. It's just picky about its friends."