E-Soar Plus 3.0

E-Soar Plus, my template for sport and F5J, has been updated. Version 3.0 offers a choice of three arming methods, plus various other enhancements.

Kev Newton launches Vic Eldridge's MPX Heron at La Muela. Taranis X9D and E-Soar Plus

Arming options

Previous versions of ESP offered a highly secure arming method however it did not lend itself to disarming and re-lighting the motor whilst flying the model - at least not without putting the model through some potentially terminal aerobatics. Rather than simply replace the old arming method, I set about giving users a choice. So the options now are as follows:

• Arming method 1: this as in previous versions, i.e. 'stick in corner and pull a spring switch'. This offers the best protection against accidental spinups, and is the default. 
• Arming method 2: pull spring switch for a couple of seconds to arm, and similar to disarm. Secure enough, and easy enough to do whilst flying.
• Arming method 3: uses a spare 2-position switch. Down to arm, up to disarm.  This method is the quickest, and provides tactile indication of arming state. The switch is 'smart', in the sense that the motor is disarmed at intial switch-on regardless of the actual switch position. This means there is no need to set up switch checks (which I find terminally annoying!). My thanks to 'Jesper' on RC groups for the safe switch logic.

The active method may be changed by editing a couple of logical switches. The scheme is documented in the Settings Reference, and users with a good knowledge of OpenTx can add their own arming and disarming methods.

(To help with programming of the 39 logical switches, I used a VBA-driven spreadsheet which offers smart insert/move/delete of logical switch definitions - this allowed the switches to be organised in logical groups, making it much easier to identify bugs before data entry in Companion.)

Other improvements

As with previous versions, the motor can only start from idle, for obvious safety reasons. There's now a warning if you attempt to arm the motor when the lever's not in the idle position.

The voice alerts sound more natural, as I've switched from AT&T Text to Speech to TTS Automate for creating the tracks. Leading and trailing silences are trimmed using Audacity.

ESP v3 switch layout

Emulate a dedicated height limiter

Detailed documentation of the logical switches is included in the Settings Reference. For those with a good understanding of logical switches, it should be possible to emulate a dedicated hardware time/height limiter, using a FrSky vario telemetry sensor and an unused timer (clue: L18->FORCE_DISARM).

E-Soar Plus version 3.0 runs under OpenTx 2.2.1 and later (support for 2.1 has been dropped). Setup and adjustment is virtually identical to previous versions. More info and + download from here.