Concept Overview

Concept Drawing/Rough Draft Sketch…

Continue

Gene Robinson's work with RP Search Services has been covered here before, but there's a nice news story with write-up here.  Gene emphasizes the positive use of "unmanned aircraft" (as he prefers to call them), and how he hopes that flight permission will be easier to come…

Continue

Symptoms: Flamewheel 450 twitches down on one arm, not the same every time, and sometimes, instantly flips over as if one prop suddenly lost power.



The cause is a quality control issue with the bullet connectors on the motor and the sockets on the Opto speed controller.



The bullet connectors…

Continue

I think that we need to restart the blog on this. 

This guy built a 40 mm ball turret that would work great in small UAS's. He said that he would not sell it but i think having him post details of how he built would be nice.

Here is a video of tit working.

If anyone has other turret systems to share of Pan and tilt systems please post... I am…

Continue

 

 …

Continue

Today we are beginning to work with depron foam for the construction of one of many test airplanes to come. In the previous days, we have built insulation foam models at a small and large scale. After testing both insulation foam models, we have collectively decided to keep our basic design, but to scale it smaller than 3 feet x 3 feet. The center of gravity was consistently in the center of our models if we tampered with weighing down some parts of the aircraft, which was a positive aspect…

Continue

The T6EX doesn't have a 3 position switch channel, so I had to combine channel 5 and 6 to get four modes. I made it work with a pot that has double terminals for each knob position, so that way there is always 2 pins to connect cables to for a single position.

 

Think of this knob as a bridge between same terminals: A to A, B to B, etc, closing the circuit to ground.

Channel 6 is connected to a terminal A and a terminal B from the opposite side.

Channel 5 is…

Continue

With added weight to the front, our foam model flew very well. These pictures show our rudimentary model for our concept plane.

 …

Continue

We are making quick progress on design, feature, and purpose ideas for our new autonomous concept aircraft. After sketching 4 possible models of planes that we could build, we have decided on one design that we are currently building out of insulation foam. After testing this much simplified version of our plane, we will propose changes that should be made to the design which should improve our final product.

 

The design we selected for our concept plane (picture of the sketch…

Continue

We are a group of 5 students attending the New Jersey Governor's School of Engineering and Technology. The Governor's School is a prestigious program at Rutgers University offered to students the summer before their senior year exposing them to many different applications and varieties of engineering. Students are nominated by their schools to apply for the competitive program, which is provided at no cost to them due to funding from multiple companies, Rutgers University, and the NJ State…

Continue

Finally our new MC-385 arrived! We are lucky to have Manncorp just a few miles away, they have been very supportive with us. Thanks Manncorp!



This little machine is similar to the Sparkfun one (MC-384) but ours has dual head! This is…

Continue

(image from http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag/WMM/image.shtml)

 

Hi folks!

I decided to implement an on-board declination calculator based on geographic location and I'd love to get some feedback.  It takes up about 1400…

Continue

Flight Stabilization integrates the tree-axis gyroscope, thee axis acceleration, which make up a basic platform inertial navigation system.

I found this new Thai maybe China Product. Maybe it could have some interest for some in here.

The manual can be found…

Continue

This Saturday I had 15 mph winds gusting to 25 mph.. Still landed without issue. Wind is coming from the top of the image towards the bottom. You can see the aircraft try to land down the runway (right to left) but fighting the wind made the path a bit weird. But impressive given that the wind was something I wouldn't have flown in myself. Here's the plot:



I have to say that windy flights are far more impressive. I had a nice crowd watching the airplane land in the crazy winds. One… Continue

This is finally the post for my headtracking system. I still have some tweaking ahead, but here is the present situation.



It is based on following components:

- Arduino compatible board (I use a spare ArduPilot board) in the airframe

- Arduino compatible board on the ground (I use a Arduino Pro Mini from Sparkfun)…

Continue