Got some high speed photographs of Marcy 1 spinning at flight speed, to see if the actuator & the wing did anything. A slow motion video cam would be nice.
The idea was to make a wing which would be pressed up into an actuator
by the airflow, but there was no way to see if it was pressing up
without high speed photography. It definitely converges on a natural
angle at which She takes off. The actuator needs to go slightly steeper
than that, to accommodate water loads. Maybe the hinge tape was keeping
it from pressing up.
It was less like hinge tape & more like kite string. The wing was
free hanging off the spar & still lifting the fuselage. There was an
oscillation in the wing angle.
Next, came a paraglider concept, with extreme turbulance. There is a
limit to the hang distance. The free hanging wing solved a lot of
problems, regardless of its actuateability. Its own weight turns it
into an airfoil.
Finally arrived at a wing with actuator, where the air flow was enough to restore its angle.
Finally, the wing actuator came on, the wing moved slightly, & nothing happened. There was no rolling, no lift, no nothing.
Another control surface behind the propeller didn't have enough thrust to overcome the airflow, at all.
It's getting closer to a heavy, brushed servo. How about a home made LCD driver, instead. A way to display data for $1 would be real useful for the credit challenged.
Took interest in using these $1 LCD panels to display data.
They have 4 ground planes, connected to all segments, & 10 wires connected to half of each digit. They're wired in such a way that any single segment can be lit by a combination of ground plane & half digit.
Driving LCD panels with bare voltages is a bit harder than sending commands to a UART. We reverse engineered the waveform, since The Goog had nothing on it.
The easiest route for us was using a voltage divider to get 1.5V & making the planes 0V or 3.3V for on & 1.5V for off.
The panel could actually be driven with only 0V & 3.3V, but it wouldn't work in sunlight. Either the UV light or the heat turns on all the segments. This alternating current with 3 voltages is how all passive matrix LCD panels work, but everything from the earliest 1970's watch to the newest LED backlit phone uses alternating current in some form.
Comments
In a past life, I used solenoids to open doors; one of the problems is the line loss at low voltages, and the consequence is a failure to actuate; however, once actuated, much less current is required to hold it closed - this suggests that your configuration should provide for the magnet to be held in close during the actuated state - and that doing so, you should be able to use pwm to reduce the current consumption during the dwell time.