Neal Blackie is a serious modeller who likes gliders – slope soaring, thermalling or from an aerotow. He has a novel way of trialling the electronics before you install them into your large model.
It started as an exercise to see if he wanted to use S. bus in a new 6 metre glider he is building. The idea was that he would try to run only one wire from the aileron servo to the flap servo, then one wire from there to the Rx in the fuselage. He also wanted to run just one wire from the tailplane to the Rx, even though he had two servos in the tailplane acting independently, again cutting down on extra wiring. That would be a saving of about 3.5 m of wire in the sailplane he is building.
It turns out that it works perfectly. He looked at adding a fully redundant switch and two lipo batteries. Neal settled on the PowerBox Sensor Electronic Switch Backer from Hobby King with 3000mAh batteries.
He set up the test model as a 2-D foam outline so that he could easily see that everything would work and fit. He added the auto pilot as well as GPS guidance. The last thing to do was to try was redundant servos. He used a pair of FrSky receivers( TFR8 SB 8ch 2.4 Ghz S. BUS, FASST compatible) as these worked with his Futaba 14MZ. The receivers just work with anything plugged in anywhere, he says. One power supply goes to each, one aileron on each Rx, one elevator servo on each and the rest plugged in to where is convenient. Simple, but effective.
Top: The FrSky TFR8 SB 8ch 2.4Ghz S. BUS Receiver FASST Compatible. No receiver channel limits( except by those on your transmitter) and prevents mismatched servo channel connections.
Above: PowerBox Sensor Electronic Switch Backer for operating / control board with three push-buttons and three power indicator LEDs.