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OpenSCAD and I have what you might politely call a love-hate relationship. On paper, the idea sounds slightly unhinged: why would anyone program a 3D model when FreeCAD is right there, ready to let you draw it like a civilised person? The answer turns out to be refreshingly simple: parameters. Now, to be fair, FreeCAD is a parametric modeller. I can work with spreadsheets and property sets, and I do. But every time I want to change a single value, I have to sit down in front of a full-blown CAD application, wait for it to load, find the right workbench, find the right sketch, and then remember which constraint I named Length001 three months ago and why. More on my naming scheme for FreeCAD in a future blog post (maybe). All of that just to make something two millimetres wider - just for a variable item that is entirely commodity? And trust me, there is the lazy moment and then a variable is exactly that: Length. Oh, which length btw? ...

Storing RC wings in a normal flat is one of those problems the hobby doesn’t warn you about upfront. Wings end up in corners, leaning against walls at optimistic angles, accumulating dust with the kind of consistency your actual flying never quite achieves. And then, inevitably, something topples. A wingtip gets dinged. A foam fuselage gets a permanent impression from whatever fell on it. You spend an evening with CA glue, telling yourself this won’t happen again. ...

If someone walks up to you and says: “I’ve found the charger that solves all your problems” — turn around, walk away, and don’t look back. Everyone has different requirements. Different batteries, different cells, different charging speeds, different levels of patience at the flying field. There’s no universal answer to that. What I can tell you, however, is that I stumbled across something that covers a surprisingly wide range of those requirements — and it fits in the palm of your hand. ...

So here’s a thing that started as “I’ll just grab some weather data and display it” and turned into a proper little project with caching, containerisation, and a surprisingly interesting detour into numerical weather models. The result is a small embeddable weather widget that you can see on the Modellfluggruppe Haueneberstein website. It shows the next three days of weather for a flying field, with time slots from 08:00 to 20:00, updated once per hour. Wind speed, wind gusts, temperature, and a weather icon for a quick visual read. With mouse-over, you’ll see additional data such as CAPE and Strength to indicate the intensity. ...

So, this is one of my favourite charging devices for the LiPo batteries I use in RC flying. It’s the SkyRC B6neo+. I mostly fly gliders, which require relatively modest battery capacities. The whole idea is to get the aircraft up with a bit of motor power, then trust the thermals — finding what we call a “bubble”, a column of rising air — start circling and just let yourself be carried. That’s been working reliably for many years, and I don’t see any reason from a physics standpoint why that should change anytime soon. So I don’t need to charge enormous batteries, which means I don’t need an oversized charger either. ...