Today my flying buddy and I took an old Sig Banshee with a throttled engine, with a servo, a battery, and the timer I'm working on, and went flying.

The timer counts laps, and can detect loops.  We could reliably end a flight by doing two or more consecutive loops. The timer would detect the loops, then at the end of the last loop would put the plane to full throttle for exactly one lap, then cut the engine dead.

This was done with an IC engine, because that's what I have.  But it could have been done even easier with an electric plane.

Who says you need an IC engine and a mostly-empty fuel tank to do a cutoff loop?

Too bad it can't detect a four leaf clover then shut off after two laps. I've done a lot of inverted landings lately, so three loops and a single inverted lap before cutoff is not my thing.

Quote from: Jim Mynes on April 15, 2014, 03:05:57 PM
Too bad it can't detect a four leaf clover then shut off after two laps. I've done a lot of inverted landings lately, so three loops and a single inverted lap before cutoff is not my thing.

It can wait to start looking for the cutoff loops until after some set period of time -- like, around the time you'd be doing the clover (which, by the way, has one full loop and a bunch of partial loops -- never two full loops).

I thought about trying to make it detect a clover, but that made my brain hurt.

Whats the matter with doing a shutoff loop after the clover?

"It can wait to start looking for the cutoff loops until after some set period of time"

That makes all the difference. If the 'no earlier than XX:XX' time can be changed by the user, that would be a handy feature, making it usable for other patterns, such as Old Time Stunt.

Rather than a throttled engine, what about a simple fuel shut-off so we can use our C/L engines?

Quote from: Jim Mynes on April 15, 2014, 03:51:07 PM
Rather than a throttled engine, what about a simple fuel shut-off so we can use our C/L engines?

Go spelunking here for ideas on shut-off valves: http://stunthanger.com/smf/index.php?topic=31441.450.  All that my timer knows is that it's actuating a servo.  What that servo is connected to (or whether its a servo or an ESC) is entirely up to the builder.

Quote from: Tim Wescott on April 15, 2014, 03:10:37 PM

Whats the matter with doing a shutoff loop after the clover?

As long as they were two outsides that would be fine

Quote from: Robert  Storick on May 11, 2014, 02:45:38 PM
As long as they were two outsides that would be fine

For some reason, the way I do the pattern, if I want to unwind my lines I need to do three.

Dunno why -- it's just how it works out.