I’m proud to announce the launch of RCadvisor’s first model airplane design competition. The best design will win a complete R/C electric power system ($100 value) or $50 in cash. The contest runs through the end of October.

How to Participate

The contest is open to all RCadvisor.com members. No purchase is necessary – enter as many different original designs as you wish. The designs must be for remote-controlled model airplanes. To enter a design, simply create a new topic in the Design Contest Entries forum. Describe your design using text, Word DOC documents, Excel XLS spreadsheets, images, videos, DWF drawings, and PDF files. A modeler of average skill should be able to build it from the information provided. See the complete contest rules.

Selecting a Winner

Members of the RCadvisor community give feedback to the designers by voting and commenting on the designs. Voting criteria include originality, quality of documentation, ease of construction, flying performance, use of calculator, value, and overall impression. The contest takes place at RCadvisor’s forums, making it easy for community members to participate. As the founder of RCadvisor, I will make the final decision. The winner will be announced in early November.

Complete R/C Electric PowerEnergy per unit of time. Common units include the watt and horsepower. System ($100 value)

• Blue Wonder outrunner 1700Kv, 24gr
• Speed control 10amp, 9gr
• LiPo battery pack 500mAh 2S1P, 20C, 34gr
• Micro servos 11 inch-oz, 5gr (2x)
• Aluminum Knife Handle with #11 blade
• Excel #11 blades (100x)
• Excel Retractable Utility Knife
• Slow Flyer 8x3.8 propeller
• Extra motor shaft
• Radial motor mount
• Prop saver
• 2mm gold connectors for motor (3x pairs)
• Deans connectors for battery (1 pair)
• Free shipping (at least $10 value)

I have been working on RCadvisor full-time for over a year. Since the website launch announcement five months ago, the database has grown to 5,000 components and the membership list has grown to 1,500. Wow! Unfortunately, the income from the website advertisements has not been very much at all. After much thought and in consultation with RCadvisor community members, I’ve decided to make the component filters and the PowerEnergy per unit of time. Common units include the watt and horsepower. System Optimizer premium features requiring a paid subscription effective immediately.

Subscriptions cost just $19.95 for twelve months. If you subscribe before the end of August, you’ll get a bonus of three months for a total of fifteen. These premium features will continue to be free to all website members through the end of August.

As a service to the members, I’m now offering to analyze your own airfoils using XFoil and adding them to the airfoil database. The cost is $14.95/airfoil. I’ll review the output and give you my expert opinion on what I see. It takes several hours to crunch the numbers for just one airfoil, so this is not a bad deal.

I’m also now accepting donations. If you like the calculator and would like to see new features added, please consider helping us out. Every little bit helps.

All of these new products can be purchased through the Products main menu option. Please log-in into your account first.

We just reached 1,500 registered members!!! I never expected to get to this milestone so quickly after reaching 1,000 just one month ago. Wow!

The propeller calculator uses the behavior of an airfoil to help predict the behavior of the propeller as a whole. Gas propellers use the Clark Y 15%, the other propeller types use MH 116. That is the reason why those two airfoils are preloaded and available with Mach data.
All of the airfoil performance data has been calculated using XFoil. XFoil is a great program, but learning to use it is not easy and learning how to get good results from it is much harder still. The results that I had gotten from XFoil for these two airfoils were not very smooth, and in turn it made the power system graphs not very smooth, either. I had accepted it as a fact of life.
I recently went back and revisited my approach for calculating the airfoil data. After carefully thinking about the problem, I came up with an improved method to get results from XFoil. I just released a new version of the calculator with the improved airfoil polars. I find them much improved.

The Data Server setting controls which Content Distribution Network (CDN) is used in connection with your account. A CDN is a network of servers that behave as one very fast server. When a data transfer request is made, the server that is physically closest to you is automatically chosen. Data updates are transparently mirrored throughout the rest of the CDN.

RCadvisor uses two CDNs behind the scenes to speed-up file transfers. One CDN is in the United States and the other in Europe. Large files such as the calculator, tutorials and airfoils database are downloaded from the chosen CDN. Your user data is also stored in the CDN that you selected.

The features available to you are identical regardless of which CDN is selected. This setting is totally unrelated to the Imperial/Metric unit setting. You can also change this selection at anytime through your account settings. But keep in mind that your saved data is not mirrored across networks. Data that was saved in the United States CDN will not be visible if you change the setting to use the Europe CDN.

Picking the ‘wrong’ location will probably make large file downloads (such as running the calculator) go at less than half the speed. If you live outside these two locations, such as Australia or New Zealand, I suspect that the United States CDN will work better for you.

The gremlins are back at work. The data server that I use for the calculator and tutorial files is having problems again. This is not just affecting us but many other websites. I expect the problem to be resolved soon.

Update: the problem has been fixed.

This had been on my to-do list for a long time. I finally got around to it.

Comments can now be added to blog entries. It should make it easier to voice your opinion.

I just released a new version of the component database with about 1,000 new airplanes, motors, airfoils, etc. The number of airfoils is now close to 2,000.

I’ve been accumulating changes to the calculator for a while without a release, so there are a lot of changes with this one:

• Filters now have a checkbox for excluding incomplete components. This is a very easy way to exclude bad data from PowerEnergy per unit of time. Common units include the watt and horsepower. System Optimizer results. Guaranteed not to slow down the Optimizer!
• Many input fields are now marked correctly as not being required. This means that the calculator can estimate a good value in most cases.
• PropellerAn airscrew. Ultimately, it is the thrust produced by the propeller that counts. Every other power system component is there in a supporting role. The bigger the diameter, the better. number of blades range increased to 1-9 and RPMRevolutions per minute. knob now goes to 60k RPM, in preparation of ducted fan support.
• New L/D result and graph for airfoils.
• Various performance improvements and ToolTipA ToolTip is a small text box that appears when the mouse pointer is hovered over a screen object. The box disappears when the mouse pointer is moved away from the object or after a specified period of time, usually a few seconds.  rewrites.

There’s also been a lot of tweaks to the website in the last week, including performance improvements.

I’m speechless! After only four months since I announced the website to the world, we’ve grown to over 1,000 registered members. Welcome!

Today RCadvisor.com turns six months old. I made the first Internet-wide public announcement about our existence less than four months ago. We now have about 1000 registered members - not too shabby!

Thank you everyone for all the great feedback. I’ve gotten some great compliments and some fantastic ideas for new calculator features. Onward and upward!