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DIY Drone Power Kite? KiteGen Kite to Generator flies a figure 8 to be a pump generator.

Posted by josheeg on May 24, 2011 at 10:15am

Where would this post go to reach the members and fit best?

Hi I am interested in KiteGen and power generation using LARGE Kites for high altitude wind power.

I think this as a open source approach could change the world in power genearation.

So what would the community sugjest could the ardupilot mega be used to control a kite?

How should the kite be designed what software what raw materials hardware how could the that be automated? If the design is open source could it be done with open source hardware?

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Replies

3D Robotics

Chris Anderson May 24, 2011 at 2:35pm

So many companies have already developed this: Makani, Joby, SkyWindpower, etc. Some, like Joby, are already open source. None have succeeded because it takes $10s or $100s of millions to create a utility-scale demo necessary for certification.

We wrote about this a good bit last year:

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/another-use-for-uavs

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/interesting-using-tethered
Developer

Doug Weibel May 24, 2011 at 10:53am

Hello Josheeg,

Several people have asked basically this same question before. I don't know where they have gone with it...

ArduPilotMega is both an open hardware design and open software. The hardware would probably be appropriate and sufficient for for your project. The software, in its current form, would not be appropriate, although many parts of it could be used in writing software for this project. The actual control algorithms for the kite would probably be fairly simple to work out. The difficult work might include reworking the IMU code to be appropriate for that use and writing code to handle when things were not in a normal "steady state".