After much discussion about my poor effort to turn a military Reaper into a NASA Ikhana, IKE took the initiative to do it right and go straight to the source. He took a Ikhana photo, flipped and tilted it so it was about right for the logo, then vector traced it and removed the unnecessary bits. Voila: our new logo. Many thanks (and a $50 DIY Drones gift certificate) to IKE!
Here's how he did it:
Hello Everyone,
I am an aerospace engineering Ph.d student at a university in New York and also the teaching assistant for an undergraduate course in aircraft design which will be partly taught in Puerto Rico. One of the main objectives for the course is that the studens have to design, document, and build radio control airplanes following traditional design formulae. Having following this community for a while, I proposed to the course instructor and also my advisor to attempt to fly autonomously at least one of the student designed airplanes off the coast of Puerto Rico from the island of Vieques to mainland Puerto Rico which is close to 20 miles!! I have been given the approval and my plan is to use the Ardupilot with pre-programmed GPS way points to accomplish this at least semi-autonomously. The idea is to also establish visual contact during the entire flight using a chase boat. I would like to ask the community, whomever has successfully implemented and flown the Ardupilot system including wireless telemetry with the ardustation or otherwise, if you would be interested in being a consultant to the project. If so, leave me a comment with your contact information and I will get back to you with further details. We plan to fly the RC airplanes/ UAVs during the first week of June in Puerto Rico of course, just to give you a time frame. Thanks everyone, Victor.
Lesson learned: don't try to wire small circuitry at 11pm at night. Last night I received a small CMOS video camera + transmitter combo (2.4 ghz LTS wireless camera) and put it on my E-Flight Blade MSR. I was actually able to lift this + battery, although it was certainly struggling. However before I could record any video, I managed to cross the positive and negative wires on the battery, and I fried a capacitor and possibly a majority of the circuitry on the 2.4ghz camera transmitter board.
So, results are in: Yes my Blade MSR can lift this rather large camera + battery, and no, the camera does not like it when you feed positive 9volts into the transmitter ground. I'm going to see if I can get a replacement surface mounter capacitor, but frankly, I think this may not be fixable :-(. Either way I'm no longer going to wire circuitry at night when I'm tired.
On a better note, check out these cool pictures from the board!
Above: identical capacitor (that IS a capacitor, right?) to the one I fried. I need to ID this...
Above: Camera on left (backside of CMOS board, and crispy 2.4ghz tx on right)
Above: CMOS
Above: CMOS zoomed in. glass is not very clean.....
Above: CMOS, focal point is on circuitry under the glass
Above: even closer
Some people thought our old header looked too much like the military's Reaper drone, so I had it redone more like the NASA Ikahana. It's not a perfect model, but close enough?
I just bought a wireless camera for my micro heli E-Flight Blade MSR. More on this below....
Before I try to make my own scratch built MAV, I'm going to experiment with a few easier projects. (BTW everyone, my future MAV is heading more towards a quadcopter...you can say "I told you so")
The above picture is a LTS LTCMW203E1, which is a 2.4 ghz wireless video camera (CMOS). It's arriving tonight, and I hope to tear it down to the board and pop it on my micro heli Blade MSR and hope that it's light enough to fly. I don't expect great results from this, as I'm not really interested in POV (point of view) flying a Blade MSR, but it's a start. I read a lot of concerns about using 2.4ghz transmitters interfering (or receiving interference) from the 2.4ghz system on the MSR, but I've also been told that they work fine. So I guess I'm going to just try it and see what happens. If I had a choice I would have gone w/ 900mhz, but long story short I'm taking a chance and will share my results.
On another note, I am concurrently working on interfacing my transmitter from my RTF blade MSR kit w/ my PC. I've been following the same procedure from http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=721024 , and am hoping to be able to read the DSM2 serial tonight. I have been pulling out my hair because for the past few nights I was trying to monitor the serial transmissions without level shifting (I did not realize that microchips speak in 0 - 3.3volt, while my PC RS232 is looking for higher voltage than that, so I need to make a circuit to bump up the voltage in the signal coming from the transmitter). Whoops!! I'll breadboard one tonight and hopefully i should be able to read the serial no problem. Once I can read, writing a program to write the DSM2 serial in LabVIEW shouldn't be too bad, and then I'll use my joystick ( Saitek x45 ) to control my Blade MSR.
Sooooo long story short, once I get the above to work (cross fingers), I'll throw an accelerometer on my Blade MSR w/ a tiny simple transmitter, and experiment with flight stabilization. this is all to help me understand the basics, so I can try to tackle more complex projects like my scratch built MAV.
Curtis explains some of the many uses of simulators including how a closed loop hardware-in-the-loop system works.
Curtis' profile on DIY Drones: http://diydrones.com/profile/CurtOlson
Flight Gear: http://www.flightgear.org/
Airframe modeling webpage mentioned during the show: http://jsbsim.sourceforge.net/aeromatic.html
Thread happening at RCG http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1198153
I wonder what exactly it is.
http://www.feiyudz.cn/en/Products/2009/12/08/92/
As Chris says, looks a bit like that Thai one, would there be any ground in doing a Chinese job in reverse and getting some and finding a better way of using them?? Maybe they are perfect??
This one does not have the pots for gains, but maybe its from the same place.
Features
·Itegrated GPS receiver, three-axis MEMS gyroscope, pressure altimeter.
·16-channel GPS receiver, 4Hz output, 35 seconds fast positioning time and accuracy of 2.5 meters CEP.
·33HZ attitude inner loop control, 4HZ outer navigation controls.
·Mltiple-channel hybrid control output can be easily adjust the mixture control. Ajust neutral position just in time
·Three control modes: augmentation remote control, smart remote control and automatic navigation control.
·Three kinds of automatic navigation control modes: fixed flight mode, the mouse pointing flight patterns and route navigation mode.
·The ground station contains electronic map function software that can change the route and tasks online, real-time semi-autonomous remote control and can be real-time flight data recording and offline playback.
·Automatic and manual remote control integration, higher reliability and practicality, can compatible with all common facilities of RC remote control, and improve the fuction of servo output checking and remote protection.
·Available online to adjust and save all the control parameters, with stand-alone parameter adjustment software which is easy to use.
·Real-time telemetry flight data and records all telemetry data.
·Contains the control voltage monitoring, electric aircraft power voltage monitoring, GPS accuracy of detection, autopilot temperature detection and so on.
·Support RS-232 interface levels.
·Volume is 100 × 43 × 25mm, weight is 75 grams, power is .
Application
·Automatic navigate and pilot small and medium aircraft of non-layout form such as Regular, V tail, lifting flaps, ailerons and others.
·A variety of automatic navigation and driving.
·High-precision real-time data acquisition, image location of synchronization in the process of flying.
Technology Specifications
All refering value is at room temperature 25
http://glxinying.en.alibaba.com/productshowimg/283638321-209605532/XY_3_Autopilot.html
Some interesting looking airframes as well, some new and some we have seen before.
