Automatic Landing Gear and Canopy

[GyroGearloose]

Gyro Gearloose's Automatic Landing Gear and Canopy

Gyro Gearloose - AutoGear.eepe

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Purpose: Retractable landing gear is great. It's sexy, and it actually makes your plane faster. But a good portion of people can't reach or remember to flip the right switch at the right time, and I thought it would be even sexier than having retractable gear (and in this case, an electric canopy), if both of those were fully automatic, based on the throttle input. Here, we assume that if the motor is running at any appreciable speed, we're taxiing for takeoff and should close the canopy. We assume that if the motor is running at a good speed for more than 10 seconds, we've either gotten off the ground by now or crashed into something, so we should lift the landing gear in flight. Cut the throttle, and we're coming in to land again. Sit with the throttle off for a longer while, and we can be impress people by automatically letting the 'pilot' out of the plane. And of course, since Murphy lives at airstrips, we want an override to force gear down and canopy closed RIGHT NOW when something goes horribly wrong.

Physical setup and Wiring: Nothing too special here. Ch3 is throttle like usual, ch5 is gear, and ch8 is my canopy. Negative values are down and open, respectively.

Implementation: (“AutoGearCn”)
Virtual switch 1 tracks whether the throttle is on (above -95)
Virtual switch 3 tracks whether the throttle is at flight level (above -50)

The gear waits 10 seconds after flyable throttle to raise, but drops quickly again below this level for quick landings.

The canopy closes anytime the throttle is on, and waits 15 seconds after being off before opening again. So, don't dead-stick for longer than this during a landing, unless you want your pilot windburned.

There is a Sticky Throttle Kill program on this model as well. For safety, the canopy obeys the stick position, while the gear only obeys the actual motor speed – so having TK engaged during setup and bumping the stick will NOT fold the gear. If TK is not engaged, then we expect you intended to fly and it's OK to raise the gear.

Finally the GEA switch acts as our bailout safety – off for “automatic mode” above, and on for “failsafe” gear-down and canopy-closed.