one of my many awesome birthday gifts was a Helo TC r/c helicopter from Griffin that you can control with an iOS device like an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. pretty awesome right? big thanks to samantha and tony, our cool canadian friends from up nort der hey.

not everyone has a huge barn to fly fun r/c toys in, but i do, so the stage was set for some fun. while you charge up the onboard battery in one of 3 ways, you then go get the free app in the app store, and load some AAA batteries in the IR dock that you end up setting your iPhone into. once the helicopter is charged, you set your phone in airplane mode (so that a phone call doesn’t interrupt your flight) and launch the app. you can use the phone like a joystick, or you can even tilt the phone to control the flight axis. pretty slick! give it some throttle and watch her fly!

it’s of course not super easy to control, but i’ve flown many types of planes and helicopters, so i had a little experience, but even still it’s not that easy. i tried both ways to control it and i liked the tilt method i think best, but to get technical, the joystick method works best.

i flew it for a good 10 minutes before i felt it losing power. i checked out some of the settings before recharging it and found the expert settings. i switched it on and found another blast of power waiting for me with full throttle now, the beginner mode doesn’t let you go past about 60% throttle. so i had another few minutes of even more intense flight! awesome.

this little beast is built to take a beating, but the parts are plastic and are expected to break now and then. they supply some of the rotor blades as replacements, but unfortunately during my second charge, i ended up breaking the tip of a ballast above the main rotor and my fun was done since that part was not included. bummer. i got some crazy glue and fixed it up, flew it for a bit and then another crash broke the whole stick the ballast was on and so i’m totally grounded.

so even though i’ve only had a couple flights with it, i’m really enjoying it. the only real downside is that griffin is not selling a complete repair kit yet, and so i have to wait until i can get her back in the air.

there’s video of my first flights in the barn that i’m going to make into a D&Dtv episode, so look for that soon.