Posts

Autonomously returning a glider from space? - Week 1

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Send the TA Sequoia (halfway) to space! Why not. A year or two ago I met a brilliant guy by the name of Kemal Ficici. He talked about how he really wanted to send a High Altitude Balloon up, similar to what David Windestal had done . I wanted to take part in it as well and offered to design the aircraft that would return the payload and.. well it kind of died there until about a week ago. The college I currently attend has an annual STEM fair and I learned about it a week or so back as well, so you can tell where this is going.  What we initially wanted to do with the aircraft was that we would equip it with directional antennas and low frequency radios so we could essentially have strong radio connection even at 10km up, but that led to some problems. What if it suddenly got cloudy? What about the cost of the radio equipment? What about FPV and live video? Then we thought, why not just cut the pilot out of the equation? For my Computer Science final project I had lazily finishe
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Hobbyking Mini OSD - Modding a cheap OSD into a great and cheap OSD

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Hobbyking Mini OSD So, let's get the parts list out of the way asap: HobbyKing OSD                 - $26 Upgrade GPS Module         - $9 USB TTL 6 Pin Adapter    - $5 usbASP Adapter                 - $3 You can find $1-$2 USB TTL adapters on ebay also. Make sure they're 6 pin. And here are the download links: U-Center U-OSD Direct Download Link Drivers you can find by googling if windows doesnt install it. Google Fu is an important skill. First, you have to take off the plastic surrounding the Mini OSD. Afterwards, flip it around and solder on some servo wires. I forgot to take pictures of mine so I will be using pictures from http://arxangelrc.blogspot.com/. Definitely check him out, he makes great content and designs aircraft too. Here's a picture that shows where the wires are supposed to go to from your Mini OSD to your usbASP with a 10 pin or a 6 pin layout. Fig 1 What I did was take a Y splitter cable, similar to this one  Cut off the en
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TA Wing V1 - Review and stats!

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The V1 of this aircraft is finally out. I have a planned V2 and V3 which will be released soon. Here are some stats: Top speed: 43 Km/h Ceiling: Above restricted ceiling - cannot test Turning radius: About 2 meters Stall speed: currently undetermined, but about 7-10 km/h Stall characteristics: Nose pitches down, recovers quickly.  AUW: Currently undetermined Propulsion: 10x4.5 propeller, 750 kV motor, 18A ESC, 5200 mAh Cruising speed: Currently undetermined, but about 15 km/h Cruising Amp Draw: 4.2 amps Amp Draw at Stall Speed: 3.6 amps Amp Draw at Full Throttle: 13 amps Aspect Ratio: About 2.6 Glide Slope (Post micro stall recovery): 7 meters Credit to Alexander Frigault for writing a stabilization code on an arduino board for this aircraft, he will release the code soon as well. The accelerometer is an ADXL345 board. The chevron wing extenders allow me to pull the main wing back to the point where it allows the aircraft to provide some pitch stability,
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Pros and cons of the wing extender

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So in the last post we concluded that the wing extenders weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing. So, what are they good for? Why is the wing extender still in use? The video goes into detail, enjoy!
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Stability testing

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Stability testing: Something I could have done two months ago in two hours but for some reason didn't do it. So I finally decided to do them, and here are my results. I'll start with the aircraft (Abi) without the vertical stabilizers. I could probably just give you a video and let you decide for yourself, but there's no reason to waste that much time. There's only one conclusion It was a disaster.  The wing extenders barely helped with yaw stability. I felt like i was in Tokyo drift trying to fly that plane around. Once the wind died down yaw stabilized a little, but was still off. It's obviously better than a pure plank flying wing, but obviously still very bad.  After i slapped on some vertical stabilizer, it was perfect, stable, and everything I could ask for. Yaw was stable. Roll, pitch, all stable. Here's something else; I'm still in High school, so i'm not very "in-depth" of aeronautics. Some things i still do not know h
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Back, with more frequency of posts!

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Long story short, i'm back with more frequent posts. I decided at the beginning of the summer that if I couldnt find an internship, I would work as hard as I could in order to gain more experience. This way, I could also get a head start on my science fair project. So far, I still don't know how I will word it, or how I will present it, but here is what I have so far. I'm designing two aircraft to support in the duties of people like firemen, and policemen, maybe even EMT's. One is a larger aircraft, designed to take air at the same time, or before the service men take road. It currently has a wing span of 80~ inches, an estimated flight time of 50 minutes, and a flight range (one way) of 25 miles. The range is probably better than expected, since I calculated the data using a cruise speed of 30 mph. I also occasionally cut the throttle (this thing glides beautifully), and that might increase the range, but for now the range is pretty short, and needs to be i
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It's working

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Well I got it to hover thanks to a certain individual that goes by the name of "Ran D. St Clair." On the rcgroups VTOL forums. Picture for now, once I get the PID values working I'll upload a video.
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