Marc's Public Blog

I almost made it to the runway, but since it was on the Playa, landing anywhere was fine, and I was able to steer towards the runway for smoother ground while decelerating on the ground, and get closer to the airport taxi area although in the end the plane did stop short and had to be towed there. While having an engine failure sucks, this was just about the safest place possible to have one, and the landing was uneventful.

As a first for this year, I also was able to bring and fly my motor glider RC plane I had spent loads of time preparing and testing. I have a separate page for these RC flights, and pictures/videos of Burning Man from the sky.

You can see most of the flight, airport, and BRC from the sky.

And do not miss my Main Burning Man 2015 report.

Pictures of the flight:

this is the smallest line at the entrance I've ever seen...

nicely marked runway

The landing was of course a bit unusual:

this is as far as we got with the rolling speed after landing. close but not quite :)

we got a bit of oil, but enough had been lost in flight that it didn't cover the windshield

The airport volunteers nicely helped to tow and secure the plane, and gave us a ride

The hole next to the yellow wires is obviously not supposed to be there

The customs department is still doing a good job :)

The airport has definitely grown steadily and is getting a lot of charter traffic, and even private jets. I also see that more people have been using my patented method of ceram wrap and painters tape I introduced in 2006 :)

nice taping job, but not enough tape to hold it

better job on this one, although it's missing the prop where playa dust will get to the grease

nice

Obviously, I wasn't able to fly home, and the charters were both full and wanting some $700-$1000 for a flight home, but thankfully I was able to find a pilot who was flying a few people back to San Carlos and had an extra seat in his plane:

room for 5, nice :)

exodus

Now that you've seen the flight, have a look at the real meat: Main Burning Man 2015 report.

Like the previous years, it was a lot of work to process/fix/sort all the pictures and write this summary report (2186 pictures this year, trimmed down to 1191, and 494 selected as the better ones sorted in different categories). All pictures are geotagged, so you can click on them to see where they were.
As a way to say thanks if you enjoy the report, share it with your fellow burners, or friends who might be interested in burning man.

If you'd like to see reports from previous years, you can go to my main BM page, and especially if you don't know burning man, you should read my 2002 page which has more of an introduction.

If you'd like to use my pictures in a commercial setting, drop me a line to discuss and I can give you full resolution pictures (marc<at>merlins.org).
If you'd like to say thanks with cash, please donate money to one of the many camps and art installations that are often out of pocket after burning man.

Summary:

Last year, I worked a bit too hard trying to bike all the streets of Burning Man, and not spending enough time to relax as well as see things on the playa within Esplanade and the art spread throughout. So this year I didn't try so hard to bike all the outer streets, although I had an extra day, having arrived Monday, so I did end up biking 147 miles/238km, but that included more deep playa biking. I also had to stay put on occasion due to the multiple dust storms we got, including one day where the temperature dropped in 2H from pretty darn warm to "I'm so glad I have 2 extra layers of clothing in my backpack" temperatures, and nights with just one shirt to nights with 2 pairs of pants and 4 layers and gloves to stay warm.

Some of my time was also spent trying to fly the motor glider RC plane I had spent loads of time preparing and testing. I have a separate page for these RC flights, and pictures/videos of Burning Man from the sky.

Black Rock City

lost and found was super organized

not bad

thank you to our lamplighters as always

dust hockey by center camp

The jokes about "this year was dusty" were actually true this year. High winds most days, even dust storm at night, but we had close to a full moon:

A couple of camps had elevated viewpoints:

There was also a trebuchet in front of center camp, which could launch a flaming piano on occasion :)

taken from my RC plane

Art

this was awesome, target shooting targets with a nail gun :)

The musical tesla coil was awesome:

Another awesome idea, a burner zap lamp with nitrous cartridges inside (and yes it did shock you if you touched the wires):

Misc night pictures:

One piece of art that was interesting was the fire snake. Unfortunately it had a twice a night fire show that I managed to miss every night because of changing times and weather issues (high winds):

The typewriter was also fun, although no matter how many monkeys we put on it, they didn't write any shakespeare :)

Charnival was also a favourite at night, lots of games to play with:

fire tetris

The lightshow installation was very sweet. Great classical music to accompany really well programmed light patterns:

A bit off in the Playa, Straightedge was supposed to show the curvature of the earth with its flashing lights:

needless to say that it was hard to photograph

Deep playa is also fun to go check out (12:00 by the trash fence). One night, there was a movie theatre (gone the next night):

And let's not forget Daft Punk which had fans waiting for them :)

The colored dots were also a great dance floor:

I also really liked this fantastic piece at night:

Just like I really enjoyed this retro game displayed on a screen using lasers controlled like old vector CRT screens:

Camps

As mentioned earlier, while dust storms made this a bit harder, and I also tried not to be as gung-ho about it this year, I still biked close to 150 miles and got to see a fair amount of camps, outside of Dustfish/Sextant I was staying at:

home sweet home, and a big thanks to Brian for the tarp I put on top of my tent to stop morning sun

Brian and Helen, who nicely took my stuff to BM and back

Sextant had a huge zipline

Other camps:

whee!

Talk from John Gilmore at camp Soft Landing

a nice burlesque show I caught during a dust storm

Camp Surprise had a reservations only French Restaurant offering fine dining although maybe somewhat inaccurate dishes :)

table mates I met in line for our reservation

Maitre D

I also like to collect fun signs :)

This surrender your baby location was brilliant!

I went to try pedal bump, half broken pedal cars where the staff would hit you with pillows and throw stuff in your way :)

Camps are also interesting to visit at night of course:

the fake millionaire camp had bouncers to keep the riff raff out :)

I also got to see real talented magicians

Voted best roller coaster on the playa!

And let's not forget the sound camps. White Ocean still had a pretty setup, but the lineup was not to my taste. Oakey ended up not playing at all, and no Trance to be found anywhere on any day :(

People

I'm told the sheep was willing :)

I also randomly ran into my friend ranger fixit

I was able to catch the French Maid parade and the Billion Bunny March this year (although critical tits was moved at a different time and ended up being in a dust storm again):

cleaning center camp :)

And yours, truly, with an LED strip I bought in Japan, a power controller I built myself, and a flashing module I got from China :)

Remember, don't be a blacktard, you'll get run over by an art car

Fires

Vehicles

This RV caught fire and was dragged on the playa to make sure its fire wouldn't spread to other camps before being inundated with water, great job!:

Not many fancy bikes this year, but this wins as the smallest one :)

There were 2 camps offering bike tracks to run. Some were challenging and it was easy to fall off and hurt yourself :)

some of these were easy to make mistakes on :)

this one was easier and you could try to see how quickly you get around it

I tried to pimp up my bike a bit, and it was so much easier to find in a sea of bikes at night:

Of course, it's more fun at night:

Temples and Churches

The Man

On the plus side the displays and attractions around the man, including the small maze to get to the middle, were well done.

The Foxcarn factory by the man was fantastic:

And of course, in the end, it burns...

Conclusion

Tips

Thanks

you can even check out kayaks to go on the river, cool :)

We took a day off our visits of Seattle to hike around Mt Rainier from Paradise Visitor Center (the South side). We first did the paradise loop and then continued up towards Muir Camp and stopped around 8000ft due to lack of time to finish the south loop:

glacier sliding down from the top

went to get some ice for lunch

those little chipmunks were bold and were everywhere :)

climbing to 8000ft gave us a better shot of the glacier

on the way down, we found lots of people going up to Muir

I see Johannes has friends who like to ski without lifts :)

the south loop took us by some lakes

I could tell those pretty birds weren't very wild

didn't take long before they came see me :)

another big lake before hiking back up to the visitor center

it's definitely big, although 8000ft is a bit high, we didn't get anywhere close to the top

our loop

what we climbed on top of panorama point, doesn't look like much, but it was, and very uphill :)

We then finished our loop to the lodge and parking lot:

Paradise Camp lodge

By the time we finished our loop, for a bit over 8H, and we only had about 1H to check out the rest of the area before sunset. We had a quick look at things on the way down with whatever daylight we had left and finished with a night hike by Longmire Lodge:

river from the glacier

by then light was fading fast

After the quick loop by Longmire, it was time for the long drive back to Seattle (almost 2H drive). It was a good day. Our main hiking loop was 11.5 miles, 7.5h from 4900ft/1490m to 8200ft/2500m. I guess a 1000m/3300ft climb wasn't too bad.

We started with the private tour of the space shuttle trainer, the cabin crews actually aren't that big, but they only have to spend about 2 weeks in it, so I guess it's not so bad. This is the actual trainer that was used at Houston Space Center and I guess it was donated to Seattle after Houston got a real space shuttle for their museum :)

We then took a tour of the main floor:

Of course, their SR71 prototype with an A21 drone is a highlight since it's the only one left in existence:

engine starter block with 2 v8 chevy motors

There were many more planes to see:

or cruise missiles

The couple of sections about space were good too:

They had a 787 on display, explaining the new avionics:

the pilot has a nice HUD like a fighter pilot would

the beluga plane was used to move the space shuttle trainer

Then, they had the room dedicated to old planes from the WW1 and WW2 era:

lots of ammunition stored in the wings

The museum also moved the red barn where Boeing used to build its planes 100 years ago, and put it in the museum:

More vintage posters:

And just like that, it was 17:00 again, and I had to rush a few places again, bummer :)
Needless to say that this museum has plenty to see and is definitely worth a whole day. We almost needed more...

nice size octopus

The pygmy cuttlefish they had were both cute and fun to play with (I kept them interested and occupied with pictures through the glass). Have look at the video, those things are super intelligent, they check you out, change colors, and raise their tentacles when they're ready to pounce. It got even more funny when I showed them a picture of a small crab on my phone:

EMP in the bottom right, and science museum just up and left of the space needle

very nice houses with their own boat and seaplane

did I say overcast?

smith tower

cars line up for the ferry, with overflow lines

many boats...

and that was it after our water landing

The mechanical switches and relays that route a phone call digit by digit were quite impressive to see, including manual switchboards where an operator would patch in your call with a physical banana plug. Here's a quick video summary:

Our great personal tour guide:

they used microwave links for point to point connections to other COs

an old AT&T video phone that worked over phone lines (with a slow bad picture due to line limitations)

check out the thousand+ amp switch with heavy copper

later semi electronic phone switches used boards like these, but they are impossible to fix or replace

it's fun to hand connect a thousand+ phone lines by hand in a conduit

before

after

Next, we went to the living computer museum, which also was quite good and gets credit for having many computers online you can interact with:

a 68k based Sun3, sweet (although it was slow)

the CDC 6600 was the first supercomputer before the Cray1

we had a Amstrad PC1512 at home

and an Amstrad CPC-464 too

we also had an Atari STF and later STE

Dongeon Master, I remember spending so many hours with this game

Both museums were quite interesting and worth the visit.

After a too brief visit of Seattle while going to San Juan Islands in 2010, I used the opportunity of presenting at Linuxcon to spend more of time to visit Seattle this time.

We had a day before the conference, and used it to go see two great museums: Seattle Museum of Communication and Living Computer Museum which are on their own page. We then just had enough time to do Ride the Ducks, because Jennifer never had so far:

Monday night after the conference, we had a party by the Chihuly glass blowing museum by the space needle:

Wednesday night, our party was at the EMP. I decided to go there with the monorail, and as luck would have it, it was the same exact monorail driver I got 5 years prior. EMP had lots of random-ish expos, those on science fiction, horror movies, and indie video games were quite good:

On Thursday, after the conference was over, we started with a seaplane flight (on its own page), and then went to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to check out what they do. While we didn't agree with everything, overall they do good work and the foundation does a good job explaining what they do and why:

We then went to the science museum (which was ok, but not fantastic), and then the sculpture park before going up the space needle to watch sunset:

On Friday, we started with a VIP early food tour of Pikes Place Market. It was enjoyable, but overpriced in my opinion. The guide was very good though:

mmmh, ok :)

Next, we went to an underground tour which shows of the streets of Seattle at the level they used to be at before the city was rebuilt on top:

the underground streets got light using those

We then took a quick stroll through town to get to Columbia Center to have other high up views:

Next, we went to the Aquarium, which wasn't the best ever, but still worth a visit.

the underground bus system is nice

The pygmy cuttlefish they had were both cute and fun to play with (I kept them interested and occupied with pictures through the glass). Have look at the video, those things are super intelligent, they chck you out, change colors, and raise their tentacles when they're ready to pounce. It got even more funny when I showed them a picture of a small crab on my phone:

On the way out, we walked a bit and went back to Columbia Center for sunset:

On saturday, we went to the Boeing Museum of Flight, which was definitely worth a full day (on its own page)
On the way out, we drove a bit for some views, and went for a yummy dinner:

at least it doesn't say 'pubic market' :)

Sunday, Jennifer got invited to go crabbing a bit up north, so we took a long drive by deception pass:

We then went to meet the friends that Jennifer made a few days earlier and who invited her to come ccrabbing with them. We got so many crabs that we had to put some back in the water (over quota).
Watch Jennifer in action:

After crabbing, we had a look at the nearby parks:

Monday, we got up early and did the long-ish drive to Mt Rainer for 8H of hiking (on its own page).

Tuesday was our last day, so we first went to the Boeing Factory tour which is well worth doing, but no pictures inside the factory, just the visitor center:

new customer planes

We then came back south to Visit Google for lunch (on its own page), and then went to see the locks and a couple of parks before it was time to go back to the airport:

We just had enough time to stop by Kerry Park for a nice elevated viewpoint, before driving back to the airport for our flight home. That was a good visit of Seattle, I feel like we got a good overview :)

Seattle was a nice city, good that we had the time to see most of it.

I wanted a big glider with flaps, and a front motor (not a crappy little pusher motor with whiny prop that would never have a lot of trust for takeoff with a heavy load). The Diamond 2500 turned out to really be the only match I could find, but it was out of production. I did however find that the Hobbyking BFG 2600 was a Chinese ripoff of it, which in this case came in handy because the original wasn't around anymore.
I typically would wary of RC gear from China because too much of it cannot be trusted, but in this case I didn't really have many other options. So, I read up on the failure rates and quickly found out that I should immediately throw away the ESC and replace it with a proper one. To be fair, the entire aircraft was $200 and my replacement ESC only was $90 (Castle Edge Lite 75A). The good news was the 60A motor seems to be decent enough so far, which is good because my old motor from the Cularis would not fit on this model anyway. Update: Motor is crap too, I burned both motors I got. The motor makes incredible power for its size and weight (and likely price), but nothing is free, the motor is too small and too light for the amount of power it puts out, buyer beware... Turnigy L3020B-600 Brushless Motor (800w) seems to be the smallest replacement that will fit.

here are bigger motors that should provide the power without burning up

you can see how much smaller the stock motor is, no wonder it burns up

The BFG2600, is indeed a big f'ing glider, as can be seen next to my X-UAV Talon with wing extensions (2.6m wingspan instead of 2m wingspan). Obviously the BFG is much more aerodynamic than the Talon which is a big of an air SUV :)
Thankfully it also flies at slower speeds and has very efficient flaps which when used as crow flaps allow for a steep slow descent for landing in smaller places (the X-UAV Talon does not fly slow and requires a fair amount of space to land):

flaps that are designed to go mostly down (more down than up), like barn doors

The build by HK was mostly ok, except for the cheap servos (I'm going to replace at least the elevator servo), control surfaces that need to be freed up before they can move, and the stickers just interfered with flying: they were half glued and peeling off:

this scared me, I filled it with gorilla glue so that it doesn't fail

the rudder horn is mostly broken in all shipments because they don't disconnect it for shipping

I ended up putting another horn with backing plate to replace the broken one:

While having the airframe built was great, unfortunately routing wires to the rear of the plane after the fact was near impossible, I had to make holes in the airframe to painstakenly route them half inside, half outside:

I made this hole to see how I could route cables inside (not so much) and stick the GPS/accelerometer

all decked up, and ready for an FPV flight with a spotter

Now while the glider is bigger and can carry more weight, it doesn't actually have that much more cargo space than the Cularis, and when it's already built, it's also hard to put anything behind the main cabin as all the space is glued together and doesn't have much continuous empty space inside you can put extra gear in:

I had to start cutting the wood to put things underneath. Note how the ESC is also tucked in the motor hole to save space

the space meant the battery had to go on top of the pixhawk, which wasn't good since the pixhawk had to have free movement to be shielded from vibrations

I built this fancy battery stand :)

just enough room for a 4200 4S battery on top, not bad

You can see the hole for the 3DR radio and once you add 2 mobius (one in the front, and one just behind the battery), things get very packed

Now, the video. For my maiden, I just stuck a mobius in the rear, which upset the CG a bit, caused 3 stall spins after takeoff while I was racing to adjust the trim, and it almost caused me to crash (see the first 45 seconds). Good reminder that too much rear CG is deadly to a plane:

After everything was ready, I had 3 cameras and can switch in flight: top FPV camera, and 2 mobius underneath where the lens is moved to the end of an extension cable to fit the lens where the camera wouldn't fit:

nice and sleek|clean airflow-wise, and no worries of hitting the camera first when I land thanks to the wheel

sadly, my 900Mhz VTX died, so I replaced it with a 600mW 5.8Ghz VTX for now

A few pictures from the front and rear cams on a _very_ windy day:

the soccer field I was flying from

shot from the rear camera

And this is what the OSD looks like (bad video quality, but enough to see where I'm going):

wind speed 25kph, 2.7km of gliding distnace in that direction while I was only 299m from takeoff point

I can switch to the 2 HD cameras in flight to see where they aim

landing, mostly against the wind, crow flaps fully deployed hence the bad glide ratio (which is what you want for landing)

If you don't get sea sick, you can see the front and rear video, along with the heavy wind sounds. It's fun to play them at the same time:

So, what are my impressions of the BFG2600?

So I do quite like the BFG2600. I hope I'll be able to soar with it one day, so far despite the huge wings I haven't been able to gain altitude on thermals yet. The good news is that it flies well, even in very heavy winds (I've tried 35kph winds so far), and has ample power to take off easily despite all the electronics it's carrying.

Update (2015/10/14)

I've bent the back pins so that they align with the servo plugs (weird that it wasn't default)

the other side of the MPX plug, I've just soldered to servo cables going to my autopilot

the left wing (top wood flap) has the plug into the wing since it's the hardest one to route cables for

the right wing has both the servo wires and an extra set of cables for the airspeed sensor

the metal wires allow for securing the servo plugs, it'd be bad if they got disconnected :)

On one side I was able to put the connector inside the airframe. On the other side, due to lack of room (a camera going through the space where the connector would have fit), I just have a dangling connector, but it's not as bad since it's only one. For the airspeed I2C cable, it needs four wires, but I was able to use only 3 with a servo cable and reuse the ground from the servo connector

on one side I was able to put the connector inside the airframe

All in all, this new connection system works pretty well, I'm happy with it :) (but it sure would have been nice if this kit had come with a built in quick disconnect, I spent way too long making my own).

Update (2015/11/10)

This was supposed to protect the camera, but it got caught and ripped off on landings. Instead, I raised the wheel

I also found out that the mobius cameras leak on the 433Mhz band, so burried them a bit lower down in the plane so that they don't affect the LRS reception as much:

it's still a bunch of wires, hard not to have them interact

turns out I wouldn't be using the dome, like most people

my wing extension kit came with this seemingly useless replacement gear that weighed way too much

sadly, the wood support didn't have any underneath plate to put the autopilot on

so I had to make my own plate to attach to the supports

The kit came with 2 kinds of servo horns. I ended up using the bigger ones, and made holes to use the backing plates with screws:

I got the wing extensions right away:

I got to fit my pitot tube between the main wing and the extension

The motor and ESC aren't super easy to access once everything has been glued:

Given how big the inside of the plane, is, I figured the bluebeam 1.3Ghz antenna might fit inside, but not quite, bummer:

almost fits...

I however had plenty of room to put a 360 degree servo attached to a mobius mount:

The wheel didn't turn freely, I had to cut out some extra foam to help it:

I then went for my first flight, I had to put 10,000mAh of batteries in the very front of the plane just to balance out the CG :)

didn't bother putting the dome

The first flight was "interesting" as in I didn't have flaperons working yet, landings were at pretty high speed. The other issue was that my elevator was way too sensitive and I had a hard time adjusting the pitch for landing, causing me to come for many landing approaches before I nailed one:

After a trip, I spent some time to put my FPV gear in because I wanted my next videos to have telemetry showing airspeed and other options on the video so that I could review it more easily and check minimal speed with and without flaps, and see how things go before stalls
I figured I'd cram the $500 gopro inside the CXN mount so that it would be less exposed in case of a crash, and the FPV camera goes on top:

I added some wood so that it would hit first instead of the cameras :)

The batteries can now be in a more central position without breaking CG:

I then went for the new maiden flight. Takeoff was a bit dicy since my Talon now weighed 4kg with all the gear, but things were ok. It flew pretty fast though and I wanted to see how much I could slow it down with flaps. Unfortunately, after trying full flaps, things looked ok for one second or two, so I got my hand off the flaps slider and that's exactly when the plane pitched straight down.
I only had enough time to pull on the elevator but not enough to retract the flaps. Replaying the video shows (with only a few pixels) that one of my ruddervator surfaces got unglued due to the G and weight stress, causing a full loss of control and full speed crash into the ground :(

The impact was severe enough pretty much everything was broken, including both microsd cards that were in the cameras:

first card has an internal short and won't work and 2nd card was sliced by the shock :(

the lipos also didn't like the Gs, but thankfully did not burst into flames

The mobius did survive the crash (the lipo inside got compressed and the lens cable unhooked, but it's working again). The gopro unfortunately had its LCD damaged, so it can still record but won't display what it's doing anymore :(
Obviously, this was very disappointing, although I leanred a few things:

We got an 11:00 reservation on a friday and we got there after a slightly less than 2h drive (yes, if you do the math, it was more time driving than eating at the end, but I knew that). The French Laundry had been closed for 6 months or so to destroy their kitchen and rebuild a new one. When we arrived they were working out of a temporary kitchen as the new one hasn't been built yet, but that didn't seem to have impacted the quality of the food we got.

The welcoming and setting were good. They had a menu printed in our name, and it only had 2 options: vegetarian or non vegetarian tasting menu, both at the same price ($300 per person). The menu had 3 dishes where you could substitute a more expensive dish. As plenty others have remarked, they strangely did not have a wine pairing option, which in our opinion is a big faux pas and something that no other such restaurant we've been to, was missing.

The food was very good, the dishes were well presented and the servers all did a very good job (service is included in the price by the way, which is the French way). In the end, my opinion was that it was very good and well executed, but not worth the 100% premium you pay over other very good restaurants with excellent tasting menus too. Part of my reasoning is also based on the fact that due to their popularity, they of course raised their prices quite a bit over time, but unfortunately also removed some dishes. We didn't come out hungry in any way, but they used to have more courses than they do now.

Then, my last point of comparison is that they serve very good traditional French food, but it's not as fancy/different as what you'd get in a place like Baume which offers molecular gastronomy, something interesting to try, or Alinea in Chicago where the entire fancy meal is a spectacle around how it's presented and served.
This may be why their online reviews seem to be a mix of 1's and 5's: people who've enjoyed the still great meal, and others who've eaten at other very good such restaurants in the world and don't find TFL so much better as to justify the price their charge and difficulty of getting reservations.

Either way, we were still happy to have tried it out and cross if off our list :)

Actually I should mention that what sets them apart is that they give you a very nice booklet that shows all the ingredients used for the meal, and how they were chosen and sourced. That was a nice touch that other restaurants we've seen, don't do.

The dinner did finish with a bunch of desserts and sugar, maybe a bit too much for Jennifer, and borderline what I could handle :)

Elevons, Ruddervators and flaperons with Ardupilot/APM::Plane

Note that this page is current as of August 2015 and tested with APM::Plane 3.3, although what I'm describing should be relevant to older versions too.

Ardupilot/APM::Plane takes your RC input and either passes it through, or uses it as input for automatic modules like FBWA or CRUISE (and in some cases will mix the RC input with the generated output, like allowing you to add aileron control to the aileron control computed by let's say RTL).

The part where things get complicated is:

Elevon and ruddervators are well documented. Even if you care about flaperons, you should look at this page since it explains the basics of mixed modes, and they are relevant to flaperons too: http://plane.ardupilot.com/wiki/arduplane-setup/first-time-apm-setup/reversing-servos-and-setting-normalelevon-mode/

The first concern on a pixhawk is that using any of those mixed modes requires decoupling the control surfaces from direct passthrough control coming from the RC Controller. Passthrough is a mode where if the pixhawk has a bad failure, it's able to connect RC1-8 directly to the relevant output channels without doing anything with them.
Obviously, if your control surfaces are mixed by the pixhawk, passthrough will not work anymore. While this kind of bothred me, I've been told that pixhawk failures are so rare that I should just forget that passthrough even exists, and not worry aobut losing it (besides quadcopters never had passthrough support anyway).

For flaperons, in the past, I naively connected my first aileron to channel 1, and my 2nd aileron to channel 5, setting RC5_FUNCTION to 18. This looks like it works, as in Ardupilot can control both ailerons in auto mode while it will passthrough channel 5 in manual mode and allow my controller to generate flaps down by controlling both ailerons.
This of course, did not allow Ardupilot to control ailerons itself in auto modes, but I didn't care.

But, I soon found out that if I had flaps down with my controller and then switched to auto mode, ardupilot would receive an aileron command on channel 1 and assume that I'm trying to mix in a turn into RTL or FBWA. APM::Plane could support this properly, but does not. You can follow this issue for details: https://github.com/diydrones/ardupilot/issues/2186

Given this, the only way to get proper flaperon support is to use the support in ardupilot is to give aileron control to Ardupilot (i.e. no passthrough anymore). There is only incomplete documentation on it, hence this post. See:

How to get flaperons to work

Ok, from there it gets more tricky. If you are unlucky, sending flaps input may cause your flaps to go up and act as spoilers, which is not what you want. To be clear with direct aileron control from your TX, you can have your flaperons go up or down (flaps or spoilers) but once you go through Ardupilot, they will only work as flaps. It's not ideal but likely good enough for most.

So, here's what you need to do next:

Tuning

Crow flaps

If you need crow flaps (which means your ailerons must go up, not down), you can use these instructions and reverse RC1_REV so that when you send flaps input, ailerons go up instead of down (while the real flaps go down). Then you should be able to set your flaps channels as flap or flap_auto (see http://plane.ardupilot.com/wiki/flight-features/channel-output-functions/#flap_auto ).
Note that this is not as versatile as direct RC control where you could use your flaps surfaces 2nd ailerons for tight turns in thermals, but only if a switch if flicked, as with this setup you can only have both flaps go down at the same time your flaperon-ailerons go up as spoilers, and only ailerons can be used for turning.
This is likely good enough for most people though.

Notes

Don't go fly yet. Go back to square 1 and make really sure that FBWA/CRUISE moves the ailerons in the right direction and that ailerons also go in the right direction in manual mode.
Now, go flying and enjoy!

Associated bugs with background:

My X-UAV Talon with pixhawk I setup flaperons on

Here are a few pictures: