Project Logs

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• Project put on hold.

  John Boyd • 06/17/2015 at 05:05 • 0 comments

  Unfortunately, the plane was tail heavy and underpowered for a hand launch. I have been too busy to build a better platform for this project. Until then, this project will be put on hold.
  

• I finished the plane and I have a working demo!

  John Boyd • 08/01/2014 at 03:27 • 0 comments

  I finished up the hardware and wrote a demo program. The demo program just stabilizes and auto-levels the aircraft, really just demonstrating what could be done with this project. The airplane gave me several challenges. I asked my fiance to paint the plane with acrylic paint, but that seemed to reduce the strength of the foamboard. Fortunately after adding LOTS of packing tape, it feels pretty sturdy.  

  Here is the demo video I made for the TI Intern Design Challenge. Sorry for the poor video quality.

• Software infrastructure is complete!

  John Boyd • 07/28/2014 at 20:05 • 1 comment

  I have written and tested all of the code necessary for reading from the sensors, determining the aircraft's orientation and controlling the throttle and control surfaces. The airplane is mostly complete, but I still need to finish the beaglebone cape and wire it into the plane (videos will come!).

  Currently the orientation code I am using is using Euler methods to calculate orientation from the accelerometer and gyro. This works for now, but in later versions, I plan to migrate to a more advanced magwick filter for quaternion based IMU implementation. This will help reduce sensor noise and eliminate gymbal lock. (You may see in the github that I have already put a lot of work into this)

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