LUSA - Low Cost Unmanned Solar Aircraft - Discussions

Hey guys!

I`m a student form italy and last year (senior year) me and my best friend made 2.3 meters (something like 2.7 yard) solar powered aircraft, of course handled by ardupilot!

It has been more a journey than a project, making it we learnt -and still are learning- more than we ever did in some of our diy projects.

The planes actually flyes good, with an overall consumption of bout 28 watts/h, and an onboard solar production ranging from 33 watts at noon of an awesome summer day to 23/25 watts of you average summer day.

Still, we have a 33 watts/h LiPo on board so we can have that extra power for take of and give the plane that little 3/4 watt/h help it needs to fly :-)

Attached there is a picture of the beast, next 3 weeks are gonna be busy as hell in college so no tiem to translate and post the two technical relations we made about it (one include xflr5 simulation of the Thing), which were necessarily written in Italian because we incidentally used this aircraft as our "senior year personal project" too, but at the beginning of august we will feed you with all the telemetry data and so on you may want to see.

Cheers!

EDIT: PHOTOS HERE!!!!! ==> http://img52.imageshack.us/slideshow/webplayer.php?id=1001042k.jpg

LusaBuild.jpg

Replies

Ludovico Antonio February 12, 2012 at 3:50am

Hi guys! We are working on a big public archive with a lot of useful data about our aircraft, we are now working on finals exams of first semester in our engineering college (Politecnico Di Milano, a great school in northen Italy), we hope we will publish the archive in a month and a half or so.

Sorry for being so slow but since being solar powered in the winter this project went a bit on hold.

here http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1488457#post19041620 you can find a lot more photos tho :-)

Bye!
bGatti September 9, 2011 at 11:22pm

Ludo,

I notice each of your main Solar cells is shadowed slightly by the wing struts.

I believe if you research Solar cell best practice, that even a little bit of shade on a cell will cause the shaded part of the cell to consume energy and bring down the rest of the cell.

Cells must be placed flush and at the same angle so they don't shadow each other IIRC.
Ludovico Antonio September 9, 2011 at 8:09am

Ok guys I added a slideshow with some pics in the main post! =) Also, I need hints in how to tune autopilot to fly an extreme light plane, 1.6 kg, in a strong wind considering its 2.3m wingspan. Tnks!!
Nick August 7, 2011 at 8:46pm

Could you give us some more detailed specifications about your plane such as what escs, motors, other parts you used.

Thanks,

Nick
Ludovico Antonio August 1, 2011 at 5:14am

WE DID IT!!!! 142 MINUTES OF AUTONOMOUS, MOSTLY SOLAR, FLIGHT!!!!!

There is also a big margin of improvement, since in those 2 and a half hours it climbed from very low to almost out of sight 5 times, it was very windy and the plane was slightly out of balance.

Photos coming soon!
Ludovico Antonio June 21, 2011 at 2:31am

help needed here!! http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/i-need-a-pwm-output-controlled

pics coming this weekend :)
Ritchie June 20, 2011 at 2:40pm

Sweet project more information would have most of foaming at the mouths in excitement.
tshado June 20, 2011 at 2:18pm

HI Ludivico

Congratulations for your DIY solar ariplane LUSA
I hope to hear from you soon and get more informations about your plane

Best regards

Jean-Claude

This reply was deleted.