Comment by Roman on April 9, 2012 at 11:00pm

Hello,

I started this kind of project with a paraglider drone, but yours is fantastic, is there a way to see it live?

I'm living in Grenoble France...

Developer Comment by Jean-Louis Naudin on April 9, 2012 at 11:12pm

Hello Roman,

I shall be in French Alp during spring (July/August) for conducting real tests flights of the ThermoPilot v6 in High Mountains...  Below a video of the ThermoPilot in action done during the spring 2011...

Comment by John Stuart on April 10, 2012 at 2:51am

As a hang glider pilot, I am really impressed. We have spent years talking about how to make thermal snoopers, especially for flat-land flying where the location of house thermals is not that obvious. With this technology you could map a reasonably-sized area for house thermals and ensure that you could up and away every time (avoiding the dreaded 'turkey' flight). Of course thermals are not continuous, but at least if the pilot knew the location he could then make a judgement as to the triggering cycle.

I'm also intrigued that you found lift over a forest, I've never managed to do that, except if it was on a slope and incorporated ridge lift.

Comment by Paul Bizard on April 10, 2012 at 3:20am

Impressive ! Congratulations !

Developer Comment by Jean-Louis Naudin on April 10, 2012 at 3:30am

Thanks Paul for your comments.

Hello John,

As you may notice in the flight log, there is a small forest in the field, during the test, there is a strong wind (25-30 Km/h) on the leading edge of the forest which create the Lift on the top middle of the forest like a slope... This why the glider is able to get potential energy in this area.

Below a photo of the forest taken from the runway with my Fashionista glider during its initial climb.

Developer Comment by Jean-Louis Naudin on April 10, 2012 at 9:17am

Here a new feature of the ThermoPilot v6.3: this is the automatic pattern generation for the Thermal Hunting relative to a pointed area.

When the switch on CH7 is actuated, a flight plan is automatically generated by the software, the flight plan containts 10 waypoints. Each waypoint are set to the relative position (lat, lon, alt) of the glider when SW7 is actuated. The pattern (above) is automatically generated and the ThermoPilot begins the Thermal Hunting process following this flight plan like a cross country soaring mission. You need only to preset the half width in meters of the pattern with the mission planner (eher 300 meters).

Regards, Jean-Louis

 

Comment by GliderUAV on April 10, 2012 at 10:15am

Jean-Louis,

 

Nice going, keep it up!

 

Regards,

GliderUav

 

Developer Comment by Marco Robustini on April 10, 2012 at 12:15pm

Now I understand where you were gone... :P
When you intend to release it? ;-)

Developer Comment by Jean-Louis Naudin on April 10, 2012 at 1:33pm

Yes Marco, its summer and time to do thermals hunting with the ThermoPilot...  So my quadcopter is now on the shelf until the fall and it is time to fly with big gliders... ;-)

My ThermoPilot firmware is still under alpha test.

Developer Comment by Jean-Louis Naudin on April 11, 2012 at 12:04pm

Here a new feature of the ThermoPilot. This is a new pattern for the Thermal Hunting process generated automatically by the ThermoPilot v6.3c. When the Sw on Ch7 is actuated in flight by the pilot, the ThermoPilot generates a grid at the current GPS 3D point (lat, lon alt). This grid contains 15 waypoints and the width has been preset with the mission planner (here 1000 meters wide).  Then, the glider is set automatically in Cross Country Soaring mode so as it follows the flight plan and hunt the thermal upward along its new path. In the sample below, you may see that it has found a thermal upwards between the points 2 and 3... This is a very interesting feature, because no PC is required in the field for building the flight plan, the ThermoPilot do this by itself...

Regards, Jean-Louis

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