=== Let's Drone Out — Episode 500 ===
Title: LDO 500 - RoboBiggles
Recorded: 2025-03-27
Hosts: Andrew "Frank" Hyams, Jack "Brightontillifly" Nash, Stephen "Belrik" Howell, Wayne "CurryKitten" Andrews
Guest(s): John Lancaster
Total audience: 913
Platforms: YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blTsVrig3EU); SoundCloud (http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/2066125064-letsdroneout-ldo-500-robobiggles.mp3)
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Check out RoboBiggles online:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVb9sqH0BzN2cFwXmj42nkA

[0.0] Jack: Hello, and you're listening to what's drawn out and special thank you to our lovely patrons that help donate so that we can pay the editor to remove the swear words and silly things we say massive thank you to Carlos campos are folk now Sam dharma on with the show.
[51.67] Jack: Hello and welcome you're listening to let your own out and unbelievably.
[58.19] Jack: Is the 500 episode more believable, though, is the fact that Frank made a little mistake and to guess the 500 episode in true classic ldo fashion will happen on episode 501 where you will not go anything I wasn't able I wasn't even allowed to buy party poppers at the petrol station.
[87.03] Jack: Because he wanted ID.
[91.39] Jack: They didn't have any and we tried to order well I went to the supermarket they didn't have any things some cake fountains and if we'd ordered them they would have come tomorrow.
[104.63] Frank: But we've got a lot more plans for the 10th year in 20 episodes 520 a lot happening for that this is episode 500 whoo yes well done us for 500 episodes we like.
[122.87] Frank: You know, we're doing well, keep him going, but you can't blame me for putting the guests, this is john Lancaster program biggles and I'm very very happy that john is on tonight, I've been wanting to drag john on for seven years, and I've finally plucked up the courage to drag john into this morass of.
[151.19] Frank: ldo I figured is is actually finally time I think we actually can do a good job and not do john a disservice without further ado robo biggles a yeah so so so john is has a YouTube channel robo biggles which has popped up a load of times and a lot of different places so people watching and listening at home may be familiar with the name robo biggles anyway, but.
[181.19] Frank: Basically, it's a lot of scale FPV and I've done john for seven years as I say, through this and that and the other, which I'm sure we'll go through tonight. But before we go any further john can you explain to people just very quickly what scale FPV means, what is that, because we've had lots of people on talking about like sticking FPV on fixed wings doing
[209.19] Frank: wing racing, we've had people on talking, you know, we've had Andy Simmons in the BFA, and had talks about all the scale models at like, Western Park and stuff. But we haven't had much in the way of well we haven't had anything in the way of scale FPV we've had some head tracking FPV with Andy RC. But if you could, can you tell us what scale FPV
[233.83] John Lancaster: variations on this the the simplest thing is to find a scale aircraft using FPV that can be simply sticking a camera on top of a scale model and flying it around. Next stage on is to put it inside a cockpit. But a cockpit as delivered with the model and the stage on from that which is where I like to live is actually building a scale cockpit. So for me, it's about building
[261.19] Frank: a scale cockpit so that it feels like you're in a scale aircraft. Yeah, so I'll show the people that are watching along with the video. If you're listening along at home on the audio only one, you'll have to find some pictures yourself. But I've brought some photos so that we can show people what we're talking about here. Because this is John's mosquito. Which, as you can see, has this like the detail in in this just from this photo. And you can see the
[291.19] John Lancaster: or the painting around the edge of the the frame of the cockpit, you've got the tiny little map. The map is great. I like the map. What what area is the map of the local area where my club flies, not that you can ever actually see the map in the camera, because it doesn't look far enough down. But there we go. Yeah, this is my oldest surviving FPV scale model. This probably goes back eight, nine years now.
[319.43] John Lancaster: Still flying. It's, I think it's on its third camera right now. That one is probably the second one in there. That was pre digital.
[328.79] Frank: So so how did you get into doing did you come from like the scale model sides and then come across FPV? Or did you come across FPV and then decide to build some scale models? Or what's what was your journey up to sort of start
[344.55] John Lancaster: flying scale? Because I love warbirds. I always have done. I grew up on the stories of biggles by Captain W.E. John's. That was my boyhood inspiration. And when I first saw FPV, when the very first fat shark cameras and goggles came out, my first thought was, my god, at long last, I can actually make myself small and crawl into the cockpit of one of my ethics kits, which as a kid, was like, oh, no, no, no.
[374.55] John Lancaster: It was like a dream that I had. So I bought a camera, stuck it on top of a glider, just fixed straightforward. That was time for one flight, just to see if I actually could fly a fixed wing with a camera. And when it came down, it was never going up again without a gimbal. So between that flight and the next one, I bought and fitted a pan and tilt gimbal.
[403.59] John Lancaster: And that was the start of my journey, really. I think it would have been about two, maybe three months later that I finished a cockpit for Park Zone Spitfire, which one of the guys in the squadron still flies around, not FPV anymore. And after that, there was a hurricane. And just put more and more detail into the cockpit so that it felt atmospheric.
[427.91] Frank: Yeah, and it definitely does feel atmospheric. Let me just quickly show a couple of photos so people know what some of the views are from inside this. So this is Stuka dive bombing. I mean, that looks excellent, doesn't it? That looks like something right out of Battle of Britain.
[448.79] Stephen: The teeny wing mirror.
[450.67] Curry: It looks great. One question I've got for Giorno, if I may, is that when I'm sticking cameras on FPV planes, and they're not spare ones, they're usually quite at the front of the nose. So your view is very open and you can see what you're doing. As soon as I'm thinking about a cockpit of a warbird, I'm thinking there's quite a big nose in front of me with propeller on. And especially when I'm thinking takeoffs and landings, is that difficult?
[478.39] John Lancaster: Yeah, yeah, the pile of foam in my loft is a testament. But that's part of the the whole joy of doing this for me is it's not if I wanted to go for a sightseeing tour, I'd go by drone. And I'd fly one of those around because they're brilliant for that. For me, it's about trying to imagine what it was like to be in one of these warbers.
[504.63] John Lancaster: That's the view these guys actually had to deal with and what they actually have to fly with. And it's it is surprising how much more difficult it is. You start learning to fly sideways as you're coming into land. You start learning how to look for 45 degrees out the side of the cockpit because you can't always see the runway straight ahead of you. So yeah, it's very realistic. But yes, it's quite a bit more difficult.
[528.15] Frank: And what you've done really well as well is pull a lot of people together at different events and and fly together, right? So then you end up with these sort of experiences where you've got your your spitfire cockpit here. But you've got the 110 in the rearview mirror chasing you down, you've got your bandit on your six. And that's, that's cracking, isn't it?
[553.27] Frank: You've got quite a range as well. I mean, we've shown it with like the Stuka and the Spitfire. And then you've got like the your multi engine aircraft as well that you've been doing as well. Right. So this is I mean, you showed the the mozzie that was your old one. But you've got the 110 that's that's perhaps is this a screen accurate 110 screen tested 110.
[577.59] John Lancaster: It's exactly made for the size of cockpit and the scale. But this is a Dynum 1.5mm. It's not big, they're only a couple of inches across. So when you try to think about what you're looking at here, some of those dials are three millimeters across from one side to the other. It's not huge. But I think you do really get the view that the pilot actually got. And there's no way a guy is ever going to
[607.59] John Lancaster: be able to afford to fly inside the cockpit of a real Spitfire or a hurricane or a 110 or a 109, much less all of them. But that's actually genuinely affordable doing this for a normal guy.
[619.75] Stephen: Have you experimented with different size aircraft? And have you ever considered aiming for live instruments instead of painted ones?
[628.55] John Lancaster: One of the problems you have with that is that the size of the instruments is so small that if you could get one to work, the camera probably wouldn't pick it out. You either set the cameras to infinity with the view outside. It's nice and crisp, which you need to be able to fly safely, in which case the stuff inside is going to be stopped.
[649.55] John Lancaster: If you reset the camera to focus clearly on the dials, which would make that a worthwhile endeavor, you then wouldn't be able to see outside properly. You'd be flying through a fog. And that is one of the restrictions that we kind of have.
[662.55] John Lancaster: If you do go for a bigger airplane, it becomes more realistic. There's a guy in the model squadron who has an ESM MEC-10, which I think is about a 14-foot wingspan. It's huge.
[674.55] John Lancaster: I built a PV cockpit for it with both the gunner's position in the back, pilot's position in the front, the radio equipment, the morse receivers, the guns, the ammunition racks. Pretty much if it's in the real thing, it's in that model.
[689.55] John Lancaster: Even that, it is only about five inches across the cockpit. What is a great development that's been around now is there's a couple of guys who have been making small LCDs that are about one, two inches of them square.
[704.55] John Lancaster: And they are building those so that you've got electronic or digital gauges where you can either have it as numbers moving around or an old gator.
[716.55] John Lancaster: The mixture of those is great, but because they've got a shot in it. Yeah, it's exactly what it is. And for the jet models, it's great because it actually can be quite realistic.
[728.55] John Lancaster: And there's a guy called Jijian who is now building these cockpits. And he's a master 3D cab designer. So he now actually designs a 3D model for a cockpit. And then he 3D prints the whole thing.
[743.55] John Lancaster: Paints it and puts it in these models. He did that probably a quarter of the time it would take me. And they look absolutely stunning. And he has started building LEDs and LCDs into those panels.
[759.55] John Lancaster: And he's just done a M29 where there are illuminated dials. There are ones that are actually moving. I mean, it is absolutely fantastic. But I don't have that CAD skill, unfortunately. So, scratch builder.
[777.55] Stephen: It still looks excellent.
[779.55] Frank: Yeah, I mean, like you say, the cockpit itself isn't going to be what's in focus, right? You're sort of focusing on the view.
[789.55] Stephen: Unless you've got something so big that it would be truly terrifying to fly.
[793.55] John Lancaster: Yeah. And to be fair, you have some restrictions on what's legal as well. There's a limit for three and a half kilos to be able to fly using the exempt. If you're flying an FPV model over three and a half kilo, you use a competent observer. You've actually got to put on a buddy lead.
[811.55] John Lancaster: And what that does mean is you can either fly FPV with a gimbal or you can fly with a buddy, but they both rely on the use of the buddy port on the back of the trainer port on the back of your controller.
[826.55] John Lancaster: I personally won't fly without head tracking. So it's three and a half kilos is my flying limit, which in the UK is that's what it is. Fair enough.
[836.55] Frank: Yeah, but you've done a very good job with it, I have to say.
[839.55] Frank: Yeah, ingenious.
[841.55] Frank: There was sort of historically there was the whole sort of personal area network stuff that the crossfire or the TBS system was going to do, but I don't know if it ever actually.
[856.55] Stephen: What you can do is you can have the trainer running over a serial connected Bluetooth and that gives you your trainer and then you can use the DSC port, which you'd normally have a trainer for physical port for the head tracker.
[871.55] Stephen: Or you could put the Bluetooth module on a UART of HDX for your trainer port and you could punch in the head tracker data wirelessly via Express LRS and just not use the physical cable at all.
[887.55] Stephen: I think there's a couple of ways of doing it, but both getting Express LRS working or getting Bluetooth module working, they're both finicity and they both require a bit of aftermarket work.
[899.55] Frank: Yeah, I think there's a lot of systems. There's quite a lot of setting up getting all of those working, I would imagine.
[905.55] Stephen: Yeah, I tried to solder a Bluetooth module and it was a pain in the butt.
[909.55] Frank: Andy is in the chat and says the problem he is having with the LCD is that they only look good towards dusk because of the brightness, so they're not bright enough to show up in the sun beaming down through your cockpit, even when it's grim and grey.
[930.55] Frank: So that's another problem. Gigabots in the chat suggests maybe transparent E-ink displays, or even the E-ink displays generally might show up.
[942.55] Frank: But still, I mean, you're not going to be able to read any of this, right? It's going to be like...
[950.55] Stephen: It's not your primary source of information in aircraft if that agent should be doing spitfires and stuff, is it? They're nice to have. Andy suggests dual receiver setup as well.
[960.55] John Lancaster: Dual receiver setup is probably a very practical thing. If you've got room for it, some of the smaller models would struggle, but some of the larger ones, getting up towards three and a half kilos, that's the real option.
[972.55] John Lancaster: Hopefully, at some point, Andy and his red eyebrows with the mantle will explore that, Phil, I think his name is.
[978.55] John Lancaster: Absolutely, yeah.
[980.55] Frank: I believe Phil may be listening. If Phil, if you are listening, stick a message in the chat, we'll give you a shout out.
[988.55] Frank: We've mentioned model squadron a couple of times, so we should probably sort of explain what that was. How did you get involved with the model squadron?
[1003.55] Frank: And do you want to give us a brief overview of sort of what happened there with the Channel 4 show?
[1010.55] John Lancaster: The BMFA, essentially an advertisement on behalf of the production, is asking for pilots to celebrate the anniversary of the RAF.
[1020.55] John Lancaster: They did the same thing in Germany. The V was the German equivalent to the BMFA.
[1027.55] John Lancaster: Bixman, I sent in the application form and sent in a video.
[1033.55] John Lancaster: But I wasn't selected to be one of the participating pilots, Andy, you were lucky enough to get that.
[1040.55] John Lancaster: But I did get a weird phone call from one of the producers, basically saying that my video, which had primarily been of me whizzing around in Amber, a cane in an FPV cockpit,
[1054.55] John Lancaster: was our tech consultant to design and build the airplane.
[1059.55] John Lancaster: And there were about 48 radio control pilots from Germany in the UK that got together to help our mates program down in Dorset for two weeks in June of 2018.
[1073.55] John Lancaster: And around about half of the people from that show have continued to get together and fly even before maidens and have double bites of things.
[1086.55] John Lancaster: More and more of them are actually becoming FPV pilots as the years go on.
[1092.55] John Lancaster: I think we're up to about five FPV pilots in the squadron now.
[1097.55] John Lancaster: What we're also doing is when we meet, one of our mates each year now, we're making an invitation or meeting.
[1102.55] John Lancaster: So it's just the reunion of the cast. We invite guests to come along and join us.
[1107.55] John Lancaster: So Andy, Arcee and Phil have been to one of them.
[1110.55] Frank: Yeah, so with the Channel 4 show filming down in Chiklok, although it was only two weeks, I mean, there was an awful lot of FPV going on there.
[1124.55] Frank: There was a few of us there that had done FPV before and sort of around VTXs and VRXs and things.
[1132.55] Frank: But I don't think other than you and a couple of others, particularly Lee and Matt, I don't think anyone else had done scale or head tracking FPV before or really come across it.
[1148.55] Frank: So how much of the FPV cockpits that went into the Channel 4 show, how much of that was you desperately building stuff in the run up to the show?
[1160.55] Frank: And how much was you sort of sharing designs and getting other people to build them?
[1169.55] John Lancaster: Well, you must think of a mad panic that the producers wanted 25 FPV cockpits in six weeks from the point where they first spoke to me and asked me to get involved in a way that could have done that on my own.
[1183.55] John Lancaster: Only three scale FPV pilots that they actually got involved were all on the technical team who were not involved in fighting on the actual show.
[1194.55] John Lancaster: So yeah, between us, we got it done.
[1196.55] John Lancaster: So I designed each of the cockpits, put together a build video and a list of parts, most of which I'd produced multiples of at the time and I built the first one.
[1207.55] John Lancaster: Those parts and those build videos were sent out to Matt and Lee in another part of the company along with the cockpits and components.
[1215.55] John Lancaster: So with the four hurricane cockpits, I built three and one was built by the other two guys.
[1224.55] John Lancaster: The 109s, I only built one.
[1226.55] John Lancaster: The other four were built by Matt and Lee.
[1230.55] John Lancaster: I did one of the 110s and the other done...
[1234.55] John Lancaster: Actually, I did both the 110s and I did the stoop because we had enough people on the show that the FPV cockpit for the High School 111 was done by a team working on it,
[1244.55] John Lancaster: collectively, at Chikorol whilst we were doing the filming of the first high school in the background.
[1253.55] John Lancaster: I think there were about five or six people in creating that cockpit.
[1258.55] Frank: Yeah, because the filming and flying and everything else, everything was happening sort of all at once.
[1264.55] Frank: So it was a pretty mad experience and it felt like we were going from like six o'clock in the morning to midnight.
[1272.55] Frank: It seemed like there was just stuff happening the entire time for two weeks solid.
[1278.55] Frank: It was a very intense experience.
[1283.55] Frank: We were not picking the best days for the weather to go flying.
[1288.55] Frank: We've got this entire crew, massive film crew here, massive production going on.
[1294.55] Frank: There's no time. You can't just wait for the right weather.
[1297.55] Frank: We've just got to fly constantly.
[1300.55] Frank: There was, you know, gale force winds and there'd be someone there trying desperately to fly.
[1307.55] Frank: So obviously the editor picks those bits of the flying, the crashing bits of the flying to go into the final production.
[1315.55] Frank: But there was, you know, a lot of flying.
[1319.55] Frank: We had a lot of pyro as well.
[1321.55] Frank: Kind of what I ended up being handed was a load of pyroboards and infrared like laser tag systems that were all kind of half built and that no one had really done anything with before.
[1335.55] Frank: And it was just sort of handed them and told, make these work.
[1339.55] Frank: I was like, OK, I will try my best.
[1343.55] Frank: And they did work. They worked very, very well.
[1348.55] Frank: They worked so well that as soon as someone fires, test fires their guns on the ground, all of the pyro's go off.
[1357.55] Frank: Just a lot of pyro has got all these aircraft all lined up on the ground, ready to take off.
[1362.55] Frank: And someone goes, oh, just make sure my guns work.
[1365.55] Frank: And then just just a load of smoke everywhere.
[1368.55] Frank: It was it was dramatic.
[1371.55] Frank: So we had to sort of learn to teach people not to touch that button until they were in the air, please.
[1382.55] Frank: It was a lot of learning experiences like that.
[1386.55] Frank: The other thing was I was given a laptop that had a little controller that had an RF link to all the pyroboards so that I could like.
[1395.55] Frank: I mean, it was intended to be that we would get all the timestamps of when all the hits were made and all the pyro went off so that the editors could take those timestamps with the camera and like do stuff with it and help their editing.
[1408.55] Frank: It turns out that the with all the the FPV going on and the all the transmitters and all the radio mics and all the talkback systems and everything else, all the radio frequency stuff in the air.
[1423.55] Frank: This poor little laptop had no chance of connecting to anything more than about three feet away from it.
[1429.55] Frank: So while everyone was convinced that I was just triggering off their their pyro when they hadn't really been hit and it was just for shows like, no, if you're if you're playing off, there's nothing to do with me.
[1442.55] Frank: It was entirely all that someone has tagged you with the laser tag.
[1448.55] Frank: So it, you know, if it was in the air and the pyro went off, that was an actual hit.
[1455.55] John Lancaster: Yeah, I love the way their team did not believe that.
[1460.55] Frank: Absolutely. I mean, the FPV side of things as well.
[1463.55] Frank: I mean, because this is like a proper, proper production.
[1467.55] Frank: But they have come is very important to them.
[1470.55] Frank: They need to keep the relationship with off very good.
[1474.55] Frank: So they probably went all out with it.
[1477.55] Frank: Right. And they got all the licenses to use all the FPV, all the power, all the milliwatts, all the all the megahertz, just everything, which I mean, the word was it was a very expensive.
[1495.55] Frank: Just just that bit would be enough to make every one of us here weep slightly, let alone the enormous production team doing the film.
[1504.55] Frank: You'd be far wrong. It cost a fortune.
[1508.55] John Lancaster: So there's the frequency plan was quite was quite complex.
[1513.55] John Lancaster: It had to pay additional frequencies to be licensed to be used at the power route, but was required.
[1519.55] John Lancaster: It ran into thousands. It was not cheap.
[1524.55] Frank: I heard I heard it was a five figure sum to do that.
[1531.55] Frank: So, yeah, that is if you want to do it properly, it is not a cheap thing to do to have so much FPV going on.
[1541.55] Frank: But it was worth it. There was some great stuff there.
[1544.55] Frank: And like you say, enough of us had a great time that then when you then started organizing some of the meetups later on, I mean, we've we've just kept on meeting up, having all these reunions, carrying on, doing the same sort of things.
[1564.55] Frank: Even without the cameras watching.
[1566.55] Frank: And it's been been great.
[1569.55] Frank: And we had the invitational last last year, he said, which we're going to have again in a month or two with with Andy RC and Phil bringing along the Red Arrows and Andy had his typhoon as well.
[1589.55] Frank: And yeah, you know, you've been there actually helping people get into scale FPV and get into FPV full stop.
[1598.55] Frank: And so, yeah, thank you very much for your efforts in keeping that community growing and keeping it a thing because it's been great.
[1609.55] Frank: Personally, I very much appreciate someone else organizing an event.
[1614.55] Frank: This episode was recorded in front of a live online audience, downloaded and edited to make sense when it played audio only, censored to please the iTunes people hosted on the Internet, forwarded through to your podcast provider, downloaded, playing on your device and is now playing in your ears.
[1631.5] Frank: All thanks to our Patreons. Consider joining them and you'll also get other online benefits.
[1637.5] Frank: Find out more at patreon.com forward slash let's drone out.
[1642.5] Frank: All sorts. So we had the FPV combat guys, I believe you came along and we've had on the show before and we had a moment there of like he recognized me.
[1654.5] Frank: I recognized him. I know you from somewhere and it was from LDA. So we have had the FPV combat guys on before.
[1663.5] Frank: It's good to have a have a have a fun.
[1670.5] John Lancaster: Let's listen, guys, again, the two guys with the goggles on Jenson Bjorn.
[1675.5] John Lancaster: Certainly Bjorn, I think, runs the FPV combat camp that gets set up in Europe each year where normally there are about 25 or 30 FPV.
[1684.5] Frank: And to have like a handful of FPV, like using all the FPV we can fill at Batminster, having all these FPV warbirds up there and having all the line of sight.
[1699.5] Frank: Filling the sky as well. You just have this for me. That is great.
[1704.5] Frank: Just when there's a cloud of things buzzing around, having these dogfights. That is great fun to watch.
[1713.5] Frank: And yes, so we we sort of took that to Charlton Park as well.
[1718.5] Frank: So if if anyone remembers a piece of cake, a TV show back in the late 70s, early 80s, I feel like it was about 88.
[1733.5] John Lancaster: I think it was filled. There we go.
[1738.5] John Lancaster: The park in Wiltshire, which was taking the part of this French chateau called Chateau Pierre.
[1748.5] John Lancaster: It was nice to get a chance to go and fly there last summer because we were we were there basically six, seventh, eighth of June.
[1755.5] John Lancaster: So across the 80th anniversary of D-Day, needless to say, those were painted with black and white D-Day stripes.
[1764.5] John Lancaster: And it allowed us to imagine the return of Hornet Squadron to Chateau Saint-Pierre in 1944 after they left the end of the Battle of France.
[1774.5] John Lancaster: It was it was a great fly there because it is an absolutely beautiful set.
[1779.5] John Lancaster: The owner of the estate is the Earl of Suffolk in acquaintance of one of the squadron has been for years.
[1787.5] John Lancaster: And it all came about because he he wanted some advice on setting his draft up for FPV.
[1795.5] John Lancaster: And at which point I found out it was the Earl of Suffolk and that this is this is his estate.
[1801.5] John Lancaster: And he invited us to just fly. And it was absolutely fantastic to do that.
[1805.5] Frank: Yeah. I mean, like all the model squadron events, it's there's a lot of just sort of mad things happening.
[1813.5] Frank: There's there's all the sort of every couple of hours, there's a big get together on the flight line with a load of like you see down the bottom here, a load of people flying FPV or giving FPV ride-alongs.
[1824.5] Frank: But also the liners like warbirds filling the sky, giving them something to chase as well.
[1829.5] Frank: And the atmosphere there is is a really fun atmosphere. I love those those days.
[1836.5] Frank: And also, you know, you do a good job of using these to try and tell a story.
[1846.5] Frank: Either it's a sort of historical story or like a sort of a bit more of a dramatic story.
[1855.5] Frank: Andy RC, who is in the chat and saying not seeing these pictures before. Very cool.
[1861.5] Frank: He asked me beforehand some some questions he wants to know from you.
[1869.5] Frank: So here we go. How much time do you spend researching versus designing and building your your cockpit?
[1879.5] Frank: As you know, you you go the extra mile with some of these are actually climbing into the cockpit and finding where the eye line is when you sit in there.
[1891.5] John Lancaster: I think the design is basically downloaded photographs of actual cockpit.
[1896.5] John Lancaster: So it's time taken to figure it inside the actual model. That does start a lot of time because it's not always obvious where to put the electrics.
[1907.5] John Lancaster: People think about a temperature control. They're all affected by heat. You need to get airflow to them.
[1913.5] John Lancaster: But build process or some simple ones have taken things a couple of weeks.
[1920.5] John Lancaster: I think the longest build, which is the ESM Messerschmitt 110 that I built for one of our German squadron members, Christian, I think it probably took about four months every evening.
[1936.5] John Lancaster: That was that was a huge goal.
[1940.5] Frank: The other thing Andy wanted to know was how do you work out where the camera should be and where it should focus, particularly?
[1952.5] Frank: Is it a lot of trial and error or have you got a locked in formula now?
[1958.5] John Lancaster: No, there is no locked in formula that I'm aware of. This is trial and error.
[1963.5] John Lancaster: It also depends what you want. So you want clear dials. You want the camera as far away the dashboard as you can possibly go.
[1972.5] John Lancaster: But that won't necessarily create a realistic distance for the view. So there are choices to make.
[1981.5] John Lancaster: And I think there's an amount of personal preference to be put into that.
[1986.5] Frank: I imagine as well there's a lot of personal preference in Andy's next question, which is how do you draw the line between where the foam ends and your scratch building or your 3D printing begins?
[2000.5] Frank: I mean, I guess the sort of you mentioned earlier about the scratch building and 3D printing being the line is the file on the Internet already.
[2009.5] Frank: But where do you leave the foam and where do you start cutting it away and replacing it with something more scratch building?
[2018.5] John Lancaster: Question to be fair, Andy. If you want to make it realistic and make the cockpit about the right model that you're in, get the file really thin.
[2027.5] John Lancaster: There's always a thick rim around the edge. The thinner you cut it the more realistic your cockpit size will be.
[2034.5] John Lancaster: But the string in the edge of your cockpit, generally speaking, the first thing I do is to cut a straight line through the foam right at the very edge of the cockpit and drop a fiber reinforced rod on the whole length of the cockpit right on the edge just inside.
[2055.5] John Lancaster: That's when I start digging out foam. I'll dig it out quite close to the edge if I've got reinforcement in there.
[2061.5] Frank: I think Andy's final question on my list here is how do you balance the exact scale of the parts versus just getting it to look right in the camera?
[2080.5] Frank: Do you make it so that the cockpit is one-to-one or not one-to-one, but is an exact scale replica of the actual aircraft?
[2090.5] Frank: Or do you balance it where you can have a slightly thicker control lever and move it slightly further away so it just looks a bit smaller and get it looking right in the camera?
[2106.5] John Lancaster: Since the percent of the cockpits I build are scratch built, they are stand-off scale anyway, but there is a bit of close enough is good enough in what I do.
[2116.5] John Lancaster: If I was 3D printing it with a proper 3D design, I might be more careful, but I don't have that skill set.
[2122.5] John Lancaster: Realistically, some things have to be made thicker in order to be robust enough to survive. Certainly, when you're looking at the photograph there of the B-25, both troll columns move with the ailerons.
[2139.5] John Lancaster: There is quite a lot of pressure on very thin devices to warrant them being made of metal, so they're actually made of bent wire rather than plastic strength, but of course it adds weight and a simple rule about minimising weight.
[2160.5] John Lancaster: If it can't be seen from the camera, it doesn't get modelled.
[2166.5] Frank: The other thing I think we should talk about before we start wrapping up is how you do the pan and tilt and how you do the head tracking.
[2177.5] Frank: I think the scratch building of a scale cockpit is just trial and error in a skill you have to build up.
[2186.5] Frank: Like a few people in the chat this evening have been saying, Richard Burick in the chat has definitely mentioned it.
[2194.5] Frank: I think someone else has as well about there being some off-the-shelf pan tilt systems and head trackers that can make your life a bit easier if you want to give this a go.
[2211.5] Frank: I will be honest, I have one of each sitting in a box waiting for me to actually get round to doing it.
[2219.5] Frank: But John, what do you recommend for people to get going with scale or at least head tracking FPV?
[2228.5] John Lancaster: I think people's budget will be a big cut of this. If people are really on a tight budget, there will be some constraints, obviously.
[2237.5] John Lancaster: If you want to go to the end of it, motion stick, really great name. That's fantastic given that it's pan and tilt.
[2248.5] John Lancaster: But the SAVOC servos, it isn't for that unit, they've got 270 degrees of rotation.
[2258.5] John Lancaster: You can literally look right back over your tail and do that in both directions for scale FPV combat. That's fantastic.
[2268.5] John Lancaster: It is absolutely smooth, but it's not cheap. I think they're about $75 at the moment, plus shipping over to the UK.
[2279.5] John Lancaster: But you get what you pay for. If you want to do it on a lower budget, there's a N260. They're about 15 quid.
[2291.5] John Lancaster: And you can then put that into a pan and tilt gimbal that you can 3D print, or you can buy a number of them already printed.
[2301.5] John Lancaster: There's just a bit of research on the Internet for that. I think the one thing we would advise, though, if you want to be inside scale cockpit, the constraints become the cockpit canopy framework.
[2313.5] John Lancaster: And so a lot of the gimbals, if you look at them, when it comes to panning, they pan and as they turn around, the camera is swinging really wide now to the left and the right.
[2325.5] John Lancaster: It swings far wider than the cockpit, and you won't get that to work inside the cockpit. If you can see it on top of the plane, it's great.
[2333.5] John Lancaster: But if you want it to turn inside, the camera needs to pan within its own footprint so that essentially it rotates around its own center.
[2343.5] John Lancaster: A pan and tilt device like that, regardless of which version, is essential if you want it to be inside a framed cockpit.
[2352.5] John Lancaster: There's a few of them around. And I think if you go into Thingiverse, where you can download STL files to print your own 3D printed stuff,
[2362.5] John Lancaster: there are a number of them on Thingiverse, probably 40 or 50 last time I looked, some of which will rotate within their own footprint.
[2369.5] John Lancaster: And they would be ideal and very inexpensive.
[2373.5] John Lancaster: There we go.
[2374.5] John Lancaster: The other end of that, of course, is the actual goggles and the device that sends the signal to the pan and tilt unit.
[2384.5] John Lancaster: So if you're going to tilt on your goggles, then those who are good at things like Arduino programming, you can actually program your own board.
[2395.5] John Lancaster: There's a few people I know who've done that. A couple of the guys in the squadron have been playing around with Arduino-based homemade senders or transmitters.
[2407.5] John Lancaster: The, again, Motion Sick have one that you can buy ready-made. Again, not cheap, but excellent quality, doesn't drift.
[2416.5] John Lancaster: Fat Shark used to do one. And if you can still get one of those, they are still available.
[2423.5] John Lancaster: The ones that go inside the Fat Shark goggles are probably still knocking around a bit more.
[2427.5] John Lancaster: But the ones that are external, that you can sit on the top of any kind of goggle, they were very good if you can still get one from somewhere. Occasionally you'll find them.
[2437.5] Jack: Anti-gravity sports have them and lying tech, I think.
[2446.5] Jack: It's like how you have the internal module.
[2449.5] John Lancaster: The other one, of course, you then got to figure out how to wire it up. But if you can get the external, you can literally just plug and play.
[2456.5] John Lancaster: But the external ones are really, really hard to find now.
[2461.5] Frank: Well, thank you very much, John. I know Martin Thompson, veteran of Model Squadron, has been trying to get hold of Rob from Motion Sick and maybe get some UK stock of the Motion Stick equipment.
[2479.5] Frank: So I know he's been working on that. But I haven't heard any news. I told him if he's got anywhere, he should let me know by this evening.
[2489.5] Frank: And I haven't heard anything. So it's still a work in progress, I guess. But I was speaking to you the other week.
[2495.5] Frank: I immediately ended up buying one of the Motion Stick head trackers because I've been trying to figure out a good way of doing that.
[2502.5] Frank: And I was like, I'll just spend the money and get the thing.
[2507.5] Frank: So I hope people listening get tempted to have a go as well. And maybe if you build anything, let us know. Share some photos.
[2521.5] Frank: Maybe we can inspire some potential invites to the Model Squadron Invitational Mayball at some point in the future.
[2534.5] Frank: I'm sharing all this this evening. So thank you very much for your time. Thank you.
[2540.5] Frank: So, Jack, have you been building up an entire pile of lists of cake toppers that you need for next week?
[2550.5] Jack: Yeah, I've got very exciting things. Indeed. Yeah, thank you. It's been episode 500. I can't believe we made it.
[2565.0] Jack: Zero, if you're listening to that, thank you for being a very first mod. Thank you to Tony for starting it.
[2574.0] Jack: Thank you to Don Robinson for getting us to start a drone podcast. Thank you to the people who started Mini Air Show that brought us all together.
[2587.0] Jack: Thank you to Summer's Pond for the wonderful memories.
[2591.0] Jack: Thank you to the hosts that have been in Garden, Jay Chipco, Andy RC, Adam Juniper, Clint Roachson.
[2611.0] Jack: Who else? Who else do we thank? It's like the Oscars. Blue Owl. She was lovely. Mako for always coming on.
[2621.0] Jack: Final Guide Oz. Thank you for everything you've done in the hobby.
[2626.0] Jack: Fossil kept us going for a long time. Fossil, Hydrone, Menace, RC, First Person View, Even Radio C.
[2639.0] Jack: Even Radio C. And the massive shout out to the Sexiest Man Alive, NJ Tech.
[2651.0] Jack: Of course. Who could figure? Who used LDO as a stepping stone to be a rock star?
[2663.15] Frank: I feel like it was a stepping stone downwards.
[2666.15] Frank: It was a mild trip.
[2668.15] Jack: A brief step down to our level.
[2671.15] Jack: A mild stumble. Alexander, thank you for showing up. Tailspin, Caroline, Richard Warwick, Clive, you're always here. Tailspin, Gigawatt,
[2685.15] Jack: Magic Pencil. Thanks for being a friend. Shady, you're the man. And Swanee Bean.
[2695.15] Jack: And thank you to D1 and D2 at the Thursday Night Show for the birthplace of Let's Trone Out.
[2704.15] Jack: You've been listening to Let's Trone Out. Thank you to all our Patreons.
[2708.15] Jack: If you got some spare change, please consider donating, even if it's just for a little bit.
[2713.15] Jack: And also a thank you to my buddy, Cole, who does all the wonderful thumbnails and sets up the stream every day.
[2721.15] Jack: And thank you, Peter, the editor, for putting up with this. Good luck with it.
[2730.15] Jack: Don't forget 20 more episodes. Ten years, baby. Ten years.
[2736.15] Frank: And we have a big party, lots of pyro. That's what it's got to be.
[2742.15] Stephen: Some more cake decorations and indoor fireworks than you can possibly imagine.
[2746.15] Frank: I'm going to I'm going to try and sort of somewhere outdoors to do some outdoor fireworks.
[2752.15] Frank: That's what I'm going to try.
[2754.15] Jack: You've been listening to Let's Trone Out. Thank you to all our Patreons.
[2757.15] Jack: And good night. See you next week for the party. Bye.