LRP Column - January 2017

In mid November, the 12th edition of the famous LRP ice speedway took place. Since 2004, 50 RC car enthusiasts meet each year to race their laps on sheer ice. The cars have become real oldtimers by now and the effects can be felt. Despite the cars being completely disassembled and rebuild again, their susceptibility for defects has increased and it has become more and more difficult for the host club MBCGoldstein to get suitable spareparts. Still – this can already be stated – the event once a gain was a full success.

The club members already met at 7am in the Eissporthalle Frankfurt, Germany, to prepare the ice track, timing, charging stations and pit area for the cars. The special thing about this race is: nobody has to use his own equipment, everything is being prepared by the MBCGoldstein. Just walk onto the drivers stand. The transmitters are already waiting and the cars are lined up at the start.

Practice started at around 8am. Every participant was able to get accustomed to the slippery surface for four minutes. The cars are all identically set up and have simple brushed motors and really basic 3000 NiMH batteries. The difficulty for the drivers was solely “on ice”.

After some trouble with the printer and the transponder induction loop, the real runs started at 9:30am. In every race, 5 drivers did race for 6 laps against each other. The pairings and the assigned cars were prepared by the computer according to random principle. A special appeal of this race organisation was that ice speedway veterans met with ice rookies that were still fighting just to keep the cars going in a straight line.

After each run, points were given according to the final ranking and accumulated throughout the 10 runs. Quickly, a top favourite for the 2016 title had established himself on the top of the ranking. Ahead of the 2 finals, Patrick Gassauer from Rüsselsheim had achieved the miracle and won all 10 of his runs. He went into the finals as the top favourite, won one of them and was therefore the deserving overall champion. Daniel Anthes, also from Rüsselsheim, finished second and Daniel Koch from host club MBCGoldstein came in third. The following positions were also highly contested.

At the end of the day, the 3 podium finishers received the typical Frankfurt trophies: a Bembel (Hessian earthenware jug, grey with blue decoration, for serving apple cider) and a bottle of apple cider. Also taking place was a big raffle with LRP products which meant that nobody had to go home empty handed.

We are proud to have finished our first LRP quadrocopter that will be completely controlled by your smartphone as transmitter. No separate transmitter will be needed. In the past, there have already been drones that were controlled by smartphone apps, but these unfortunately worked unreliably with the connection breaking off the control feeling imprecise, sluggish and unintuitive.

Our engineers were able to solve these problems and came up with a very reliable and good WiFi connection between the Gravit Smart Vision and smartphone. All operation commands for the quadrocopter and its HD camera are issued directly from the smartphone. You can either use the virtual sticks on the smartphone and pilot it just like with a regular transmitter or you can choose to control it by using the gyro integrated into your smartphone.  That is absolutely cool and great fun. You can fly it by tilting your smartphone in your hand. The smartphone detects the movement and sends it as command to the Gravit Smart Vision, which then flies into the direction corresponding to the smartphone’s inclination. It is all very intuitive and easy to handle.

The camera that is also operated from your smarthone does not only save the videos in HD but also transmits the live feed in HD to the camera in real-time, enabling a great FPV flight experience. All favourite features from our other quadrocopters like altitude hold, headless flying and auto-land are also on board.

One completely new and thrilling feature is the track-flying feature. You can draw a flight path with your finger on your smartphone and the drone will fly this predetermined path on its own. Get creative and challenge your Gravit Smart Vision!