I rarely crash. Maybe I've been lucky? I had been ignoring a bug for the longest time only to have it occur just as I was over the trees ready to land. There was no time to recover. Continue

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Ever fly on days you know you shouldn't? Trees were swaying, and my gut was saying no. But I guess you never know until you try. I'd have to say that I couldn't fly in this wind. The ground track of the aircraft was so unintuitive, especially on landing. At times it was just hoovering overhead making minimal progress.



Days like this that really test your autopilot.



Anyway, this video shows my full auto-landing sequence, complete with the dive from 180… Continue

Doomed flight is here:







Hobbypartz.com has great prices and great motors. I think. But for some reason I seem to be having some very bad luck frying motors lately.



I've been running one of their 450TH motors rated for 230 watts (http://www.hobbypartz.com/45oubrmo6.html) at exactly 230 watts, and haven't had much issue with very short bursts at the 230 figure of 40 seconds or less for… Continue

I don't know how long of a distance it takes for most of you to land, but when diving in below the treeline from 200 feet I pick up tremendous speed on my EasyStar to the point of hitting 50 mph and overshooting

the runway, ending up in the trees.



Of course I can land in 500 feet easy, but making my autopilot do it was

not. I was curious if anyone wanted to chime in on how they solved

their…

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Finally, the article I wrote is out in the May 2010 issue of Circuit Cellar Magazine. Unfortunately I have yet to get my hands on it. From http://www.circuitcellar.com/magazine/; it's $2 to buy or go to Barnes and Noble and get yourself a copy of the magazine.

The FreeSpace IMU: A Quaternion-Based Algorithm for Attitude Estimation…

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Here in Boston, we have snow and wind. Not good for testing landing code. I hope to have some time in a few weeks to test and post the results of my new landing code. The old landing code can be seen in this video. Unfortunately coming in for a single approach like this has the EZ-STAR touching down at 28mph, and taking about 800 feet to land. The new landing code which I flew a few weeks ago does it in 300 feet.





The new idea is to circle in a radius of 125… Continue

I just added a pitot to my ezstar (http://bordelon.net/ezstar) and did a flight. Naturally the plots of the airspeed sensor and GPS velocity (projected onto the X axis... straight thru the nose) did not seem to match. But should they? I figured any wind would skew the results, so how do you know you're calibrated?



I first tried to make a "manometer" with a tube of water but that seemed to just make a mess and was off by 50% in the end.



I finally just flew with the… 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

But is is ever? I define finished as in it works every time I go fly now. I go to the field, turn on my plane and it takes off, flies to waypoints, and lands with no user intervention. It's done this now for the last 4 times I've been to the field! So it feels more "finished" than ever.





I didn't use any kits or open source stuff, and built everything from scratch. Except the EZ-Star of course! I also use my own sensor fusion algorithm, which is to be featured in Circuit Cellar… Continue