Plotfoil

Plotfoil is a package for plotting airfoil sections to a variety of printers. It consists of three programs: plotfoil plots (in PostScript) airfoil sections (well, actually any section that is not smoothly closed) and allows for spars, sheeting, template sizes; editfoil is a program that allows airfoil sections' camber and thickness to be changed to any desired value; and mixfoils allows different airfoil sections to be hybridised. All the NACA 4-digit and many of the 5-digit sections can also be generated.
If you don't have a PostScript printer (or if you want to preview PostScript on your display) you need Ghostscript, from ftp.cs.wisc.edu.

The source-code for Plotfoil is available: GZIP'ed tar format (approx. 1.1 MB) or PKZIP (approx. 700KB) -- these archives include a Tcl/tk graphical front-end and all the airfoil data from the UIUC low-speed tests airfoil site); MS-DOS executables are available (this includes the MS-DOS binary distribution of Ghostscript as well as all the airfoil data and is about 2.2 megabytes). Warning: my development environment is Unix, and I don't have access to any kind of Micros**t system; let me know if there are problems but I might not be able to help you.
Michael Shellim (mshell@cix.compulink.co.uk) has written a MS-Windows front-end for Plotfoil pfwin31.exe ; it requires the Visual Basic runtime DLL pfwinvb31.exe . I no longer have these files; please do a web search for them if you're interested.
Plotfoil runs on all systems that I know of that have a C compiler. The current release version is 3.3.
What do you think of software patents and interface copyrights? If the right to write programs is important to you, you should consider joining the League for Programming Freedom.

Introduction to R/C Flying
The rec.models.rc FAQ list is availble both via ftp and WWW. Here's the HTML version. A text-only version is available by anonymous ftp to ftp.drones.com; get rc-flying-faq.txt

Glow Driver
This is a circuit diagram in GIF (36K) format for an intelligent glowplug driver. It features flood feedback and excess current protection. Uses the versatile 555 chip and an op-amp, with transistors for current control; another version uses a MOSFET. (By Jonathan Scott, ETI June 1983.)

is a free Unix clone that runs on PC's (386 or better). It comes with TeX, compilers, Emacs, X windows.... the works. And unlike the dreck foisted on us by those villains in Redmond, with Linux you don't have to hit that reset switch on your PC five times a day!

Please let me know if any of these links are broken!

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$Date: 2005/07/23 20:37:44 $