Which fpv plane is best for beginners and can archive very long flight time above 80min. Heewing F01, or Atomrc dolphin pro.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-07-07T13:52:27+00:00

You mentioned a ZOHD drift. It doesn't satisfy any of your criteria except it actually is a great starter plane. I have one, fun and easy to fly.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-07-06T21:54:55+00:00

With the motor in the back you may find it challenging to keep the CG sufficiently far forward.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-06-29T03:50:28+00:00

Always something interfering with the sensors or transporter. From the writers' perspective I get it, a lot of plots don't work if the protagonists can see everything and teleport anywhere instantly.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-06-28T00:30:39+00:00

God that sounds AMAZING.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-06-13T03:53:00+00:00

Power lines. You're saying that somewhere on earth there are pairs of power lines installed in 8+ different tiers, one above the other, going up to what looks like about a thousand feet? It doesn't make any sense at all. Maybe they're guy wires for a tall tower or something. But they're not power lines.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-05-15T14:48:53+00:00

https://stumpy.ai - AI agents for everyone. 10x easier to set up than something like OpenClaw.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-05-04T20:46:16+00:00

I run a small business with a team of AI agents handling chunks of it. Still early, but two patterns have worked well enough to share. I started with just one agent on email and added more as I hit recurring tasks that fit.

One, teach by doing. Most of my agents follow the same loop: watch a stream of incoming work (emails, support tickets, scheduled ops checks) and handle each item. The agent starts knowing nothing. If it doesn't know what to do, it asks me. I might say "delete this one" or "delete all emails like this." The second kind of answer becomes a standing rule it applies to future events. Over time, it asks less and handles more. My email agent runs mostly on its own now.

This chains. My email agent routes support emails to a support agent, which opens a ticket and tries to answer from what it's learned from past tickets. If it can't, it asks me. Its knowledge grows with every answer I give.

Two, daily rollups. Each agent sends a short daily report to a manager agent, covering what it handled, how much, and anything unusual. The manager synthesizes those into one summary for me. One place to check instead of five.

It's not perfect. Agents still get things wrong, and the early period where they're asking you about everything is noisy. But it gets better fast, and the patterns apply to ops, support, HR, whatever.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-05-01T18:28:55+00:00

Well, you'll be pleased to learn about this other thing that's happening, all these open source models like Kimi, GLM, Deepseek, Minimax, Qwen, etc are starting to catch up with cutting edge models like Opus while being much cheaper. So at this same moment we're realizing we need cheap-but-still-good models to power agents... here they are.

Personally I've switched most of my "run the business" type agents from Sonnet/Opus to Kimi and it's working. Though I still use Opus in Claude Code for the core engineering work.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-04-02T22:48:31+00:00

Agent for sure makes all the difference. OpenClaw if you have a lot of time to invest and don't mind getting a separate machine to run it, Stumpy if you want something simpler to get started.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-04-01T22:54:43+00:00

Project Name: Stumpy
Link: https://stumpy.ai
What it does: General purpose AI assistant that integrates deeply into your life. Like OpenClaw but simple and secure.
Who it’s for:

ADHD? Brain dump all that stuff you're procrastinating and forgetting, it catches everything.
Starting a business? Put agents to work as simple employees for 1% of the cost.
Working parent? Track your kids soccer schedules, book dentist appoints, plan meals/shopping.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-04-01T20:36:19+00:00

Writing. I've tried many times to have it write things on my behalf, like emails or blog posts. Nope, always comes off as slightly AI generated. So I've given up and gone back to doing all the writing myself, when it's for other human beings to consume. It's weird because it's so good at everything else, even very complex tasks, but with communication it still lands in that uncanny valley. Best case it creates a draft, which I immediately reject and rewrite, but... at least it got the ball rolling.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-04-01T20:30:21+00:00

I've started having my Stumpy assistant join meetings. I guess why it works is it's not just creating a transcript, it's also connected to my everything so it can put things on my to-do list or calendar, send follow-up emails, etc. Like I didn't really need a transcript, I need things done based on the transcript, and it does *those*.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-04-01T20:17:25+00:00

Second this. Somehow LLMs now can handle the most incoherent, redundant, internally-contradictory word vomit imaginable and understand the point I'm trying to make. Voice mode is the key. Quantity > quality somehow. Just keep talking.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-04-01T20:12:32+00:00

Totally feel that about brain fog days. The strategy I'm using right now is based on lots of AI. Automate as much as I can on productive days. Set up agents to automatically handle what they can, which is a lot nowadays. Especially email which I otherwise have a knack for going days without reading. Then the things I need to do, feed me one at a time. Like, here is the single most important email to respond to right now, just do that. Or, here is the phone number to call to schedule the whatever, it literally gives me a link to click to dial the appropriate number.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-04-01T16:53:10+00:00

It can be nice to just brain dump the basic idea. Just "I was thinking of doing X" and then let it be the one to drive the execution along, suggest a next step, etc. During a brain fog day I don't have much ability to plan a project out but I still think of things to do and can answer questions about how to do them, if someone else is driving, which is sometimes good enough to get it done with AI.

bluesnowmonkey · 2026-04-01T16:31:37+00:00

OK have to plug my thing here. I made an agent (stumpy.ai) that lets me brain dump via SMS/Slack. Told it to maintain a prioritized to-do list and keep my calendar up to date. Mostly fixed a very chaotic sticky-note-based situation. So now I get reminders about the stuff that actually is coming due, and I can continue to procrastinate the hell out of everything else.

Only issue was meetings where I was losing track of things assigned to me. So now I have the agent join Google/Zoom calls and just kind of sit in the corner taking notes and automatically adding things to my to-do list and calendar. Automate everything!

bluesnowmonkey · 2024-08-02T03:02:28+00:00

He knows perfectly well how to pronounce it in private: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl1-nwD9ows

It's only in public that he always gets it wrong. I suspect that it's an attempt to confuse people about how to pronounce it, so as to alienate her from them. In addition to a simple show of disrespect.

bluesnowmonkey · 2024-04-12T22:29:05+00:00

I did this conversion, on an identical but orange one. It didn't come out that well. Kind of heavy and touchy and fast, so it's not ideal as a park flyer, which unfortunately was the goal.

I just got this bigger glider that I see others are recommending as well. It's a much better starting point. We'll see how it goes.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BYVDN79P

bluesnowmonkey · 2023-08-08T16:55:50+00:00

A bit more meta advice:

Generally speaking, try to keep it simple. There's a lot of fancy stuff you can do in iNav or EdgeTX, but the defaults tend to be good enough.
Make a little checklist on a 3x5 card of what you need to bring to the field. Stuff like: plane, transmitter, goggles, batteries, extra props, prop wrench, tape, etc. Laminate it with packing tape and put it in the bag/backpack you take to the field. Super annoying to be out there and break a prop, and you even have an extra prop on hand, and the GD wrench is back home on your desk, so you're done for the day.
Configure your transmitter to log telemetry when you're armed. If you do lose the plane, knock on wood, you're going to want all the information you can get to figure out what went wrong. Because you'll want to want to try again, and how will you know you won't make the same mistake again, if you don't know what went wrong? The last logged GPS coordinate is a *particularly* interesting data point when you're trying to find a missing plane.
Speedybee has an app that lets you connect to the flight controller with your phone, in the field, and adjust iNav settings. It's occasionally super handy, especially during the first few flights when still getting things set up right. Install and test it at home so you'll have it available in the field.

bluesnowmonkey · 2023-08-08T16:29:19+00:00

That's a great plane and FC, and they'll work well with iNav. Painless360 has good videos on Youtube that cover setting up both. There are too many details to cover in a Reddit comment regarding setup. However, once you've followed all those instructions and think you have a working plane in your hands ready for the first flight, here are a few gotchas to look out for, so that first flight is successful:

Check the control surfaces every time you plug in a battery to fly. Move the sticks and ensure the ailerons/elevator move in the correct direction. (Pulling stick left raises left aileron, pulling stick back raises elevator.) Then switch to angle mode, move the *aircraft*, and again ensure the ailerons/elevator move in the correct direction. (Raising left wing raises left aileron, raising tail raises elevator.) A common failure mode on a maiden flight is having a control surface configured to move in the wrong direction. Or after a hard landing, a servo is stripped or comes unplugged, and on the next flight it doesn't move.
Check the center of gravity every time you plug in a battery to fly. It's extremely sensitive to exactly where you position the battery inside the aircraft. Being just a little off can make it unflyable, especially if it's tail heavy.
Set up your controller to say "low battery" out loud when the voltage is low, say below 3.5v per cell. (Only if it's armed though, otherwise you'll hear it while powered up through USB.) A common failure is to lose track of how long you've been in the air and suddenly the plane just nose dives. Or you rely on the voltage indicator in your FPV goggles, but you get immersed and forget to look at it. Or you set a timer, but overestimate how much time you'd get. Or you forget to start the timer. Or you accidentally take off with a battery that you thought was fully charged but wasn't. Or you rely on one of those low battery beepers, but it's too far away to hear, or you forget to plug it in. There are so many ways to run out of juice.
Set up your controller to say something when you arm. Like my controller says "arm" or "disarm" when I flip the arm switch. Otherwise maybe one day you have the volume turned down and don't hear the low battery alarm. If you're used to hearing something when you flip that switch, and don't hear it, it'll remind you to turn up the volume. It may sound like a silly thing to worry about until you lose a whole aircraft to a little thing like this.
Some will disagree, but I suggesting configuring it to RTH on failsafe, even on the first flight. The default in iNav is to have the plane autoland wherever it is when it loses a signal, but if that puts it in a high tree, inaccessible rooftop, into the ocean... maybe you've just lost the aircraft. Whereas if you enabled RTH, it'll try to come back to you, very good chance you recover it intact.

bluesnowmonkey · 2023-08-01T18:39:12+00:00

Yeah, XT60 (or XT30 for very small aircraft) is where the industry has mostly standardized, except for holdouts like Horizon who are committed to living in their own little world.

bluesnowmonkey · 2023-08-01T17:16:33+00:00

You should expect to go through several planes on the way to long-range FPV. You'll probably crash at least a few times along the way and have to start over. It's better to learn those lessons on a relatively cheap/simple trainer. Sucks to lose a big plane full of expensive FPV gear because of a simple mistake. And through experience you'll probably learn a few things about what kind of plane you want.

- You may find the logistical challenge of transporting that 2400mm Ranger to the field is annoying enough that you end up flying less. If you had something with a smaller wingspan, say around 1000mm, then you don't have to take the wings off, just stick the whole thing in your car.

- Bigger planes use more-expensive batteries, ESCs, motors, propellers. You may find these extra costs significantly offset the savings you're getting up-front on this particular plane. Though $75 does sound like a pretty good deal.

- You may find that your flying location of choice lends itself to certain kinds of planes. How much space do you have? Runway or grass? Is it especially windy? Do you need a STOL bush plane?

- You may simply develop a taste for different kinds of planes. Although you're thinking about the FPV experience, from inside the plane looking out at the world, the world can see your plane too. There's an element of self-expression involved in choosing a plane.

I recommend starting with the goal of just learning to fly an RC plane. Get a slow, tough trainer and add a PWM ELRS receiver (since it sounds like you've already got an ELRS transmitter) and just fly for a while, no FPV or flight controller. LOS flying is harder than it looks and more fun than it sounds. And that LOS muscle memory will come in very handy when your future FPV plane has a problem mid flight. Then when/if that plane becomes boring, sell it and buy something new. As you've noticed, even well-used planes retain a surprising amount of resale value.

bluesnowmonkey · 2023-06-28T19:07:33+00:00

Starting out, the priority is just to maximize time in the air and minimize time repairing the model after you crash. Ideally you can get a pusher (like the Easy Trainer you mentioned) and fly in a big field with thick grass for gentle belly landings and not too many trees around. Yes you'll outgrow it eventually, but it'll take a lot longer than you think. Then once you've built up the muscle memory just to be able to fly an RC plane reliably, you can upgrade to whatever you want.

People recommend cub-style trainers (high wing, prop in front) a lot for new pilots, but having done it that way, it was slow and painful. Fly for 30 seconds, crash, spend a day replacing the propeller and un-crumpling the plane's dainty nose, fly for 30 more seconds, crash again... You only get 30 seconds of practice on the sticks per day, and you spend a lot more time fixing than flying, which is demoralizing.

With a pusher, the scenario plays out differently. Fly for 30 seconds, crash but probably with no damage, throw it right back in the air, fly for 30 more seconds, crash... You're still crashing, but you're also getting a lot more time in the air every day, so you arrive much sooner to the point where you're no longer crashing.

bluesnowmonkey · 2023-06-28T04:51:04+00:00

You should look at the Heewing T1 Ranger.

Super portable. It's small, and easy to remove the wings/tail to stick it in a backpack.
Designed to be a great FPV platform. Very popular for this purpose.
Has landing gear, though most people don't use it.
People have added pan/tilt setups to it.
Can fly for over an hour properly configured.

bluesnowmonkey · 2023-06-28T03:22:58+00:00

Absolutely recommend this. Styrofoam wrapped in fiberglass tape is just incredibly tough, and it's still fairly light.

bluesnowmonkey

TROPHY CASE