Discussions

Our High Altitude Balloon (HAB) project aims to return the electronics on board a HAB autonomously. Traditionally, weather and HAB's return electronics safely to the ground via parachute, but this obviously steers waaaayy off from the launch site and takes hours to find. We aim to cut down the risks involved by just bringing everything back via flying wing.

The flight plan is as follows:

1.) Climb to 100,000 feet under balloon
2.) Have balloon explode at highest altitude and have small parachute bring down the plane from 100,000 feet to 30,000 feet. Lack of air pressure makes the void from 100,000 feet to 30,000 feet an uncontrollable abyss for the glider. Small parachute is used to decrease terminal velocity.
3.) Airplane releases itself from flight line and glides towards destination.

My Project Log series aims to provide short sweet and to the point updates to said project. Heres the most recent one:

This week I try to start making progress on the flight controller. Starting off with the original program code written by Kemal, I try to fix things here and there to smooth out the glide.

Next video will explain the program a little bit more, and will be of trying to achieve a successful autonomous straight line flight, and trying to incorporate turns.

Side note, you guys know of any other arduino flight controller projects i could pick up on and learn from? Computer science isnt my strong suit.

Previous uploads:

Project Log 1: Introductions

Project Log 2: Base Flight Test

Project Log 3: Q&A about design choices

I'm trying to do this whole project from the bottom up DIY, so i'll be keeping an updated, weekly project log series going! Let me know what you guys think of the project so far, and drop any feedback if you have them!