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Here is a fact nobody tells you when you get into building RC planes: you will need funnels. Lots of them. Big ones, small ones, wide ones, narrow ones, thick-walled ones and the flimsy kind you don’t feel bad about. The hobby has an apparently endless appetite for pouring things from one container into another. Some of these funnels survive and get reused. Others don’t. Pour epoxy through a funnel once and you’ll learn very quickly that it’s now a single-use funnel, preferably used right before it becomes a paperweight. Epoxy is great at many things. Letting go is not one of them. ...

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. ...