Add strength to foamies planes

The coolest thing happened last night. Many posts I've seen tell you that if you want to add shear strength to your foamie aircraft, you need to pray adhesive prior to covering it with packaging tape.

I'm afraid to say... that's half the truth!!!

You see, eventhough the tape will stick for a while any sharp flexing of the wing during flight will cause the rape to start stretching because it detached from the foam surface.
This caused the stretched tape to wrinkle up and no longer add structural strength to the foam.
So how do you prevent this from happening? Add heat. You see, with heat the glue of the adhesive tape is activated and the foam surface slightly softens to give you a strong bond.

So what temperature should one use? Well I did this part by trial and error. I found that a temperature of 80 degrees was sufficient to activate the adhesive and foam sticking to each other. I still feel that using a spray adhesive over the foam area gives a better chance for the tape to make a permanent bond.

So the long and short of it is that making use of a simple clothing Iron on adhesive tape can add substantial strength to your foamie design and insure that those crashes are not completely fatal.

Enjoy!

Comments

Setting up the Tarot T4-3D gimbal on the Pixhawk 2.4.8 with Specktrum dx6 Gen2 toggle switch

So i took the challenge of setting up the Tarot gimbal not just for inherent stable video footage but also the flexibility of controlling it from the radio control. However, I encountered quite a few challenges which made me aware that I'm not the one only in this battle . It's quite clear that the setup of the Tarot gimbal using its own software is completely different from how it's been described in the Ardupilot/Arducopter webpage and in mission Planner. In Mission Planner and it's associated site makes one believe that it should be done through software, only to realize that in actual fact the setup is more complex than that. After two evenings of trying various combinations, I realized the getting the pixhawk Aux channels to communicate with the T4 gimbal requires the following steps: - The Pixhawk Pin9 (Aux1) needed to be activated to pass through user-chosen channel from the transmitter. For the Dx6 Gen2 it was the channel 6, which can assigned the

Matlab to C/C++ code development - Some learning points

Over the last few years, the engineers at the company have invested both their time and sleepless nights in formulating a process for the development of Machine learning algorithms that will satisfy real-time constraints with minimal RAM usage. This is quite a tall task as per default, that would force one to do their development directly in C language. Although that seems like the right choice, the downside is the direct correlation of the debugging time with algorithm complexity. Such a time could have been rather used in optimizing the algorithm within the MATLAB environment which has excellent tools for the analysis, plotting and debugging. So it was decided to rather learn the Code generation process with the hope that future algorithm could be designed in a similar fashion without the hassle of the compiler-specific run-time issues. The development of this machine learning algorithm would eventually be implemented in a 32bit, 160Mhz speed, 260KB RAM microcontroller.

Setup ArduPilot flight modes with DX6 Gen 2

Hi, I've looked around the web to get an understanding the setup of the Ardupilot flight modes with a Spektrum DX6 2nd generation and there was none. So I decided to write this blog. The few things to consider when doing this: Please follow the instruction given on the ardupilot webpage . Have the Pixhawk hardware connected to Mission Planner (I have 1.3.50 - Copter V3.5.3) Use the display bar in the Radio Calibration page as a guide while changing the rate pulse widths on your transmitter. I've used switch D to change the pulse width ranges on channel 5.

Search This Blog