About me and workshop ramblings

Welcome to Aerowidgits, based in the hills of North Wales. I build custom electronic accessories designed to make aeromodelling more reliable and fun. Alongside developing new gadgets, this space serves as my workbench notebook: sharing build experiments, circuit tweaks, aeromodelling thoughts, and the occasional trial flight story.

I've been building model aircraft for over 60 years (with a break for cars, beers & girls) - models of all types but of late, returning to the traditional balsa/tissue style, albeit with electric power, rather than rubber or small i/c. The photo opposite shows a Tempo Solo being built into an Me262 - intended for a rocket motor, this has a pair of 7mm coreless motors.

The origin of the Tempo timers...

25 Sept 2026 20:10

During the winter months, there's a group of us that hires a nearby sports hall once a month for indoor flying, and it was here that I noticed some friends using electronic timers with small free flight models. Noticing that these timers were rather fiddly and imprecise to use, I looked around to find the smallest available microcontroller that had Bluetooth built-in - this turned out to be the ESP32 C3 SuperMini, a popular microcontroller module. To create a means of entering flight details, I chose to write an Android app, using the friendly authoring system available at MIT App Inventor - a brilliant resource for anyone who wants to write custom apps for their phone.