Do I really need another hobby? Sigh. Oh well, it appears that whether I need one or not, I’ve taken my first tentative steps into the world of radio controlled airplanes, and I have Mark H. of the Eastbay RC blog to blame. Mark is a fellow Pixarian, and has lately been sucked into the world of model aircraft, building both autonomous UAVs as well as more conventional aircraft. I first started talking to him about this stuff through our interest in the Arduino, but he’s got me interested in scratch building my first RC aircraft.

To entice me (and to serve as a model for copying) Mark left his version of the F-22 Raptor in my care:

Mark’s scratchbuilt F-22 Raptor, in EPP Foam

The design comes from this posting on rcgroups.com, and seems pretty straightforward. But I’m so inexperienced with this stuff, I was a little bit intimidated, so I spent most of the weekend staring at the plans, and digging up further resources. The page above listed this nice vimeo video:

which is also available in four parts on YouTube (glad to find, so I could watch it on my Apple TV on the big screen TV):

When I start working on mine, I’ll post more pictures and information. I did stop by Harbor Freight and picked up some X-acto knives and one of the Dremel-tool-knockoffs, and I picked up a Turnigy 9X transmitter-receiver pair. Stay tuned for more soon!