Hi. I have made some modifications to the MatrixPilot code to do tests on In flight tunable gain. If this is further refined, it will be possible to do tuning of P/D gains on roll, pitch and yaw axis while in flight. The idea is that the gains can be tuned with a spare button on your RC transmitter one after the other (separately) while you fly the plane in stabilized mode. The gain you want to tune is gradually increased until oscillation is seen at max desired airspeed… Continue

Hi. I have finished the first prototype of the lightweight KFM3 wing for my UDB2 / Matrixpilot UAV. The wing is made entirely out of Polystyrene. The benfits of this wing are: wide AOA range, wider stable CG range since lift is produced farther back on the wing surface, no aileron reflex needed so lower aileron reflex drag. I will add vinglets to reduce wingtip vortexes and drag due to vortex leakage out from the rear KFM surfaces. …



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I have made a USD 2,- handheld cutter head for the PWM controller desribed in my previous blog post. The handheld cutter is nice for trimming off edges and so on. The spring keeps the wire tensioned. The final version don't need a series dropping resistor as the PWM driver stage uses two FETs.



The controller has also has been tested on a vertical setup for cutting spacers to my KFM3 depron… Continue

I have finished my Arduino based pulse width modulated (PWM) hot wire cutter controller. It allows precise USB or analog temperature control of a hot wire of length from 10cm to 2m for use with manual cutters or CNC based cutter. The PSU is extermal…

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Just wanted to inform you all that I have sucessfully modded and flown William Premerlani's UDB2 board (red board) with the invensys gryo board designed by Russell Duffy. The AP / stab code was MatrixPilot r466 and the planes were a Fun Jet and an Easystar clone (higher wingloading and with ailerons). …

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I have attached an Excel sheet that I made with the equations needed to design a barometric altitude sensor.

For lower altitudes and for small altitude deltas, one can assume that there is a linear relationship between pressure and altitude. Please see the attached Excel sheet for more details.



The SCP1000 pressure sensor seems like a very good candidate for a pressure sensor:…

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Here are some photos of my new pulse width modulated (PWM) hotwire foam cutter prototype.





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I use it for cutting foam of all types. Instead of moving the wire, I move the object to be cut. In this way it is possible to make straight and 90 degree cuts referenced to the base plate. I have drilled a hole in the baseplate for the hot wire to run…

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I got the telemetry and videolink azimut / elevation antenna tracker prototype up and running the other day. Here is a video of it (without antennas) when it receives ASCII commands from the test software running on my lab PC.





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Preliminary specs:

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720 degree azimut rotation range

>110 degree…

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I will start doing some radio range tests across the valley (line of sight) with this "test-board" today. As you can see this is test board #1, and it looks ... well ...



The tests will be carried out by car at first. If the tests are sucessfull, the INU will possible become airborne within a few days. First some out of the loop tests, then I will start integrating the DevBoard into the airframe and test some RTL… Continue

I have now written some initial telemetry code that extracts data from the internal data structures of the r,p,y code running on the UAV DevBoard. The code generates ASCII telemetry frames.



I will later make a binary telemetry frame format for better efficiency. If you have suggestions to the format, let me know. It would be nice to be compatible with the Ardustation.



What I would like to integrate in my UAV system in…

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I have now sucessfully sent rmat data from William Premierlanis green UAV dev board to the PC and displayed it with the pyton code developed by Brian Wolfe. I tailored the datagrams from the UAV Dev board to fit Brians format so I didnt have to recode the Python code.



Video:







I use a FTDI board attached to the spare serial port of the UAV Dev board. I send data as ints and…

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