Phil Green Posted November 27, 2014 Share Posted November 27, 2014 My Dad started me flying R/C at about 10 years old, and after varying success with his home-brew Single-Channel radios, the OS Pixie was our first ever commercial R/C set. It was supremely reliable and I've many happy memories of single-channel slope soaring back in the late 1960s. It had a relay receiver driving a 'Climax Unimite' motorized actuator which was incredibly noisy. It could be heard plainly at 400 feet above, but was very handy when finding a model buried in deep bracken! Owning an OS Pixie again had been a nostalgic 'must' for some time, when Doug kindly gave me an original boxed Pixie, with the receiver connectors still unsoldered - probably unused. Now I love this set and I'm very very grateful - but its immaculate and so not really an ideal conversion candidate. The aim was always to fly a Pixie again - and so the hunt for a suitable donor continued. Eventually at this year's Nats swapmeet, Shaun spotted an old, tatty Mk1 Pixie and I crossed the sellers palm with silver. I was really chuffed to find this Pixie tx at the Nats and paid £15 for it. Its far from mint, has cracks and chips but its just like the one we had. I'm looking forward to flying a Pixie again! At the time it was one of the smallest Single-Channel sets ever, if not the smallest full range transmitter. I thought it would be a real challenge to fit everything in, others have done the larger one (the later model was still small but bigger than the first one) but as far as I know this is the first mk1 conversion and it looks really tiny. There are examples of Pixie Mk2 conversions on the S/C website. Space being at a premium, I cut down an encoder board by lopping off the Futaba connector end, and mounted all the components flat without socketing the pic, tried various layouts and in the end it all fitted in easily. The biggest problem is all the heavy wiring - quite why Frsky use mains 'twin & earth' to connect everything is beyond me - so I removed it all, ditched the bind board, rewired it again with the thinnest servo cable which I think was 28swg. Its all hard wired, no plugs & sockets, to save space. The V8HT module has the original heatshrink removed then after rewiring re-shrunk with a piece that fits properly without overlaps. As per the trend, the bind board is ditched in favour of a separate LED and a new SMT pushbutton, again to save space. Details here. The module led fits nicely in the Pixie aerial-tuning hole, with a bit of filing the aerial fitted exactly into the original hole, with the encoder leds just under the on/off switch. The new bind button is a minute smt button mounted inside next to the battery (PP3 as per original). One shortcoming of the original Pixie was the button - it was horrible, spongy and with no real feel, so I found a microswitch that matched the original but with a nice click and good tactile feedback. To make it look authentic, I had to spray a button black as I only had a red one! Anyway here's the result, all good to go: (sorry it somehow ran to 7 minutes!) Cheers Phil Edited By Phil Green on 27/11/2014 17:38:19 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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