F3F BallastManager

BallastManager is a weight-and-balance calculator for F3F/F3B/F3G model. Set your models up once, then count slugs in and out at the slope and watch what they do: wing loading, all-up mass and centre of gravity, live on your wrist, before the model leaves your hand. WHAT IT SHOWS Wing loading leads the display in a large figure, because it is the number that decides whether the ballast was the right call. Mass alone does not compare between ships. A heavier model with more wing flies the same air as a lighter one with less, and g/dm2 is the figure pilots quote to each other on the hill. Under it sit the all-up mass and the centre of gravity, with the shift the ballast has caused beside it. The CG line carries a coloured band: green when the ballast has moved the balance point forward of where the model sits empty, red when it has moved it aft, and no band at all when the two are level. The model's name sits at the top of every screen, so you always know which of your fleet you are loading. Above 75 g/dm2 the wing loading turns red and the watch gives three firm pulses, once on the press that crosses the line and once on the press that brings it back under. SETTING A MODEL UP Each model carries its empty mass, the balance point it sits at empty, its wing area and its ballast tubes. Each tube holds its own figures for lead, steel, brass and tungsten: what one slug of each weighs in it, and how many fill it — four lead or six tungsten, because a tungsten slug of the same mass is shorter. Set a metal to zero and that tube never offers it. A new model starts with the three tubes an F3F ship usually has. Every arm is measured aft of the wing leading edge, one datum for the whole calculation; a tube ahead of it takes a negative arm. Figures go in as your build sheet writes them: arms to a tenth of a millimetre, wing area to two decimals, slug weights in single grams. Rounding them would move the balance point further than a slug does. Up to twelve models, up to ten tubes each. Duplicate copies a whole model, so a second ship of the same type is a rename rather than a fresh setup. SHARING A MODEL Share, in Model setup, draws the model as a QR code. A friend scans it with their phone, which shows a six-character code; they enter it under Models, Import on their own watch, and the model arrives with its tubes, arms and slug weights, empty. The code lives five minutes. AT THE SLOPE UP and DOWN move between the tubes; START opens one. Inside a tube, UP adds a slug, DOWN takes one out, and START moves to the next metal that tube takes — it moves no slugs, so a tube can hold a mix. Under the count it shows how many more of that metal will fit and how full the tube is overall. A tube with no room refuses another and the watch buzzes, so a refusal never looks like a button that did not register. Clear ballast empties every tube at once between flights. WHAT IT NEEDS One permission, the phone connection, used by Import alone: fetching a shared model is one request through your phone. Sharing out needs no phone, and nothing else in the app touches a sensor, the phone or the network: no GPS, no barometer. Every figure comes from numbers you entered and slugs you counted, which is why it costs almost no battery. Everything you enter stays on the watch. It runs on Garmin watches and Edge units with a colour screen, by buttons or by touch. Monochrome devices such as the Instinct are not supported, because the selected row and the coloured CG band are invisible there. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO BallastManager cannot weigh your model or find its balance point. It does arithmetic on the figures you give it: if the empty mass is wrong, every number it shows is wrong by the same amount. Check your model's weight and balance physically before you fly, and again after any repair or change to the airframe. Questions: [email protected] Product page: https://shop.cubio.no/p/ballastmanager.html

1.0.119 Trial period, bug fixes