Originally Posted by
DGrant
Curious what kind of quantities your looking for.... and what kind of quality as well. All hardware is not created equally, and some of the cheaper hardware/accessories might serve your purpose for testing and experimenting.
What comes to mind is some of the servos I've seen at Hobby King that are only a few bucks each, and some of these EBay sellers have the cheap plastic horns and such... really for pennies if you shop it. Same goes for motors... they can be had for a few bucks each as well...if that. All this is relatively low-grade equipment, but again I don't know how intense your needs are.
You mentioned "transmitters".. which leads me to a question as to how many transmitters.. curiously, as one transmitter is capable of flying a whole fleet of planes(one at a time of course)... but even at that... again Hobby King has trannys in a very low price range... like around $30 if you shop it.. as well as receivers too...cheap...again these are low-grade trannys.. but they're out there.
If you stepped up to Dubro or Sullivan style components, there you're talking about a bit more money as that stuff is more "hobby quality" and durable, but you might not need that for your application here. Even some of that bought in bulk can save a few bucks just by purchasing bulk packs. As for higher end electronics.. there's always the classifieds as well... and learning to shop that.
If these "wings" are such that you need much higher end components and such.. well.. I would say just be ready to spend some money.... but someplace like HobbyKing.com could get you started on your experimentation.... after the initial testing you might determine where to better your efforts in components... and higher end equipment. Just a thought there. Good luck with it.
Thank you for this. And thank you to @carlgrover and @pkoury as well
To answer your questions, Grant, I'll likely start with lower quality servos and such (like from Hobby King), and as I narrow down the designs (looking at 100+ designs to start, buying 10-20 of each component to start) I plan to buy more components and parts that are higher quality. On the final build, I'll probably end up dishing out some serious cash for ultra parts for my fleet, being around 50+ planes with multiple components to have as reliable backups in case something goes awry. For the final fleet design, I'm looking at probably 100-200 of each part, as 50 is just the starting estimate. I may have significantly more, and depending on their usage having 4x as many for backups may not be a bad idea.
As for the transmitters, I'm thinking between 10-20 transmitters as I want a fleet to be in the air at any given time. For carnival games, a business idea, or other things, I'm not entirely sure where this will take me. However, it's nice to know I may only need 50 transmitters (again, in case something happens) to swap out (or that) for my entire fleet.
I hope this has answered your questions, and thank you again.