Flying and aviation is my passion and I have flown pretty much everything from large scale model airplanes to multi copters. A couple weeks ago I met a fellow RC Pilot who was flying an RC Paramotor and it was an amazing experience. Naturally I started to look to buy a cheap model that I can play around with without breaking the bank.
Surprise, surprise – there was none. Every kit on the market starts around $600 and a trike setup will relieve you of more than $900. Dreams crushed.
Well, not so fast. There is a reason I have a CNC machine in my garage and I decided to design my own RC paramotor with the goal to keep it below $150.
After doing some research and selecting the parts, I came up to a price point of $122.50 – not bad. I did not had to buy a receiver and batteries since I already have these.
Designing
Now it was time to design the gondola. This was an interesting task because unlike airplanes and multicopters – a Paraglider or Paramotor really only fly’s because of the wing and your entire gondola design needs to take the wing in account at all times. It took me about three iterations to come up with a solid design.
Cutting the parts
It was time to put the vector lines into an actual part. I bought my CNC about 8 years ago of eBay and has not let me down to this date (knock on wood).
It took about an hour to get everything done. During assembly I had that great idea to put LED lights on it – you know everything is better with LED’s.
Everything is better with LED’s
Using an Arduino Pro Mini I quickly created a simple LED setup that can be controlled via an RC channel. I integrated a couple modes that I think make sense for flying an RC Paramotor during dusk times.
The code along additional instructions can be found at https://github.com/flyandi/pmled
At last! …putting it all together
It was fairly quick to assemble the gondola and finalize the setup.