I saw that Aria had one of their 3 channel apache helicopters on superspecial for £35 with free delivery the other day.  I couldn’t miss it, so I ordered one.

It arrived today and its awsome.  Got a little bit of flying out of it before the battery was flat.

Quite hard to control with the extra dimension of movement, I’m used to two channel ones where the wind mainly takes it forwards.  I’ve just about got it trimmed now, just needs some fine tuning.  The build quality doesn’t look brilliant but it should be okay.  The manual was fun to read, as its made by dragonfly, its been translated from chinese/japanese I think, so most of it makes no sense, there was even a word in there which I’m sure isn’t a word in the english language.

Battery charging is around 1 hour 40 mins and you can apparently get about 20-30mins flying time.  Which I can believe as its a LiPo battery in the chopper, and its not a small one.

Its even got a little light where the machine gun is.

Pics below:

Went over and found that the damage wasn’t actually that bad.  The cab had split in half, which is just a peice of flimsy plastic peice of plastic anyway.  The rear shaft bit (don’t know what its called) had broken off at the join to the body.   Also, the radio equipment box had broken off its mounts.  I tried fixing it with some glue about 6 months ago but that didn’t hold it strong enough.  However, I managed to get it fixed with some peices of metal (I think it was paper clip) which were cable tied to the body and the rear shaft.  Then I stuck a load of hot glue on it all to hold it in place.  You can see what I mean in the pics.

This fix seems to work and it didn’t break on the first flight.  I’ll just have to be careful with it on landings.

I thought about having a blog a while ago, but couldn’t think of anything to put in one. However, all of a sudden, I can think of lots of things to write about.

So, where to start. I guess a chronological order is probably the best.

2 weeks ago I bought a micro helicopter from Aria for about £10. I had got a helicopter from them before, about a year or two ago (I’m talking about that later) and wanted to get another one. I saw that they had these cool, indoor micro helicopters ont he superspecials. So I ordered one with some other stuff. About 2 days later it arrived. Got it out of the box, gave a quick glance at the manual and then turned everything on. It actually flew quite well out of the box, although it needed a bit of trimming, which unfortunatly is controlled by buttons rather than a proper trim slider.

Eventually I got the trim setup correctly and then gave it a full charge for 30mins. It flew much better after the charge, I hardly ever used full throttle as it would soar up very quickly and hit the ceiling.

Controlling it took quite a while to get the hang of. As it will only go up/down and spin left/right its rather hard to control which direction it goes in. It will however sort of go forward when you do a right turn. After multiple crashes into chair legs, walls and my mums face (oops) I got the hang of it and was flying round the house like a pro.

On the 29th of January I had my 18th birthday. Didn’t really do much. Got my new PC however, which comprises of:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 GO with Arctic Freezer 7 Pro
Asus P5K Premium WIFI-AP

4GiB Patriot PC6400 Cas4

Asus 8800GT 512MiB with a Thermalright HR-03GT

Samsung 160GB Hard-drive and another 320GB one and a 160GB one.

and my trusty old Thermaltake Armour.

And another pic with all the lights on and no flash,

I decided that after a week of letting it settle in and getting things setup that I had to OC it. I couldn’t not do it.

So, I read through the OC guide in CPC about three times just to make sure I understood everything, (I’m not a total n00b, just I was used to OC’in AMDs as that was what my old system comprised of). I then started upping the FSB, I am now running at 3GHz (303 x 9) and my RAM at 800MHz with 4-4-4-12 timings and it seems to be pretty quick. Much quicker than my old AMD 3200+ (S754) with 1GB PC3200 RAM.

Graphics performance is also phenomanel and was very surprised to find that I could crank everything up to max in all the games I’ve tried so far, even the Crysis demo. After reading lots of comments on the CPC forums and elsewhere I didn’t think I would be able to play Crysis at ‘very high’. but everything defaulted to that, granted the resolution is only 1024 x 768 but I’m on a 17″ monitor anyway. The defaults also didn’t set any AA, but I decided to add x2 just to get some and it didn’t seem to give any adverse affects.

Well, I think I’ll stop there for today, don’t want to make my first post an absolutly gigantic one and then not have anything left to write. I think I’ll just add some links to pics of my PC.

PC Pics