Well, the longish-awaited* Big Box showed up on my doorstep today**: the Bixler R/C plane I'd ordered from HobbyKing!
Now, what I'd really wanted was the Ready-To-Fly version, but that was only available from the Chinese warehouse, with seriously hefty shipping charges (and a caution about not being able to ship the LiPo battery), so I settled for the Almost-Ready-to-Fly version from the U.S. warehouse, plus speed controller, battery + spare, and a cheap 6-channel spread-spectrum radio system.
Mechanical assembly of the plane looks to be pretty straightforward, once I find a spare hour or so and a flat surface.
But... the ESC is sans connectors, so I need to round up mating connectors for battery and motor.
Nothing else obviously troublesome, apart from also needing a new charger for 3S LiPo batteries: I plugged one into my old cheap little 2S/3S charger, which blinked its light for a moment, then indicated full charge and emitted smoke. Dunno what went wrong; the charge/balance connector matches, and the cells seem to be in the right order.
Anyway: busy day tomorrow, but part of that is my first visit in quite a while to the Electronics Flea Market at De Anza, and perhaps someone will be peddling LiPo chargers cheap. (I don't figure on buying much, what with both cash and storage being in short supply right now, but I gotta put in an appearance every so often.) After that... put in an appearance at the TechShop open house, see what's new, chat with sundry people, and all that stuff. Then Back To Work, at one location or another.
* One gets spoiled dealing with the likes of Digi-Key and Amazon. Not everyone ships within two hours of the order, by Tardis Express.
** For "today" read "Friday"; somehow, I went to bed in mid-sentence, without hitting Publish.
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