So decided to try and get some flight time at a park near my house. The calm weather had it that I managed to do more nose-in hover and slow circuits. All in all, I will need to make another landing gear as the plastic material is too brittle to hand hard landings.  Accumulated time: 64 min

It was another windy day of flying. That's when you appreciate flying the heli calmer weather. Managed to clock in 8 minutes of flight doing various maneuvers. included side hover. I decided to put my Gopro Hero4 silver to good use by capturing some videos from the ground. It was not the perfect angle although the dynamics of my flying in windy weather was obvious. I was very choppy on the sticks (due to wind mainly) which made me question how the challenge that's awaiting me when I turn this heli into autonomous machine. Had a bit of hard landing which bent/broke the landing gear. But the heli does not know any difference. Accumulated time: 52 min

So today was a really good day because I've managed to hit just under 15min of flight using the three batteries show in the picture and most importantly with a failure. The wind was alot calmer today which made flying a breeze (excuse the pun). I was also able to do nose in and slow circuits which was a huge confidence builder. Now on to the specifics: Even though I was doing tail control (and to be fair there's a pretty bandwidth gyro in the loop as well), I found that rotating the heli to get it into a nose in position caused quite a drift away from me so much so that I had to quickly bring to tail-in in order to recover the heli (achieved about two succesful crash-worthy recoveries - Yeah!). This could potentially be a inherent in the dynamics (which i think it is) or there's further tuning that's required. In any case, success once again. I can see why accumulating more flight time in bulk helps. You get to correct and improve that crucial confidence onto th...

#samtheman analyzing his #helicopter #toy with such attention. #drones watch out for this guy. #takingover #uav4africa #proudpapa via Instagram http://ift.tt/2g35NTr

So today was a day when I decided to increase my flight time per session. I've started using two battery packs which meant that I know have to change over and also do some tweaking/learning on the transmitter to have a more comfortable flight. Even though It was quite windy (which is pretty normal now), I find myself being quite nervous still, Although It will go away with time. It could also be that I know how powerful this heli is and that I'm really wary about doing too much too quickly. To my credit, the heli got away from to about 50m and 15m in height and almost freaked out. Luckily I didn't panic and slowly brought the heli back in eventhough I was really struggling to make out its orientation. I was tempted to run closer but I must say I froze a little bit. I realize the amount of wind pushed it away and I wasn't actively controlling the throttle on the heli. Now I know better. I decided to have a couple of landings (some of them really hard) s...

We're in lesson 5/100 before inverted flights. Decided to up ante and do min 10 min of flying for every session. Three packs of battery should give me 12min of flight. #uav4africa #drone #rcheli via Instagram http://ift.tt/2eEwDDJ

Another succesful 4:30 min of tail-in and side to side hover flight. Accumulated time: 21min. I found it quite difficult with wind to stay at a consistent height, I landed the heli twice and I should have made changes to the throttle/pitch curve or the mixing. It was quite challenging flight in hover in gusty conditions but I'm finding keeping the heli in the air longer much easier. Next is to slowly transition into face in and then nose in (although I feel I'm more comfortable nose-in). In the meantime, I've started working a instrumentation platform that will be integrated between the landing gear and the frame of the heli to hard gathering data. That should bring about more result-orientated fun!

So after the crash from the previous flight, I received a new set of landing gear. Given that I was on daddy duty this weekend, I didn't get to do any flying. So today during lunch I decided to get over my fears and get going with my flying. One thing that got me quite nervy (as if I wasn't apprehensive enough), was that the wind was quite gusty today. Windsurfer  reported about 7 m/s (25 km/h) winds gusts with roughly 6 m/s (21 km/h) wind speeds. But in my mind (call me foolish) I thought this would be a good test of my hovering skills in the midst of all disturbances. After binding the heli, I took to the skies with the thumping heartbeat. The wind gusts in the open field started becoming more evident in the control of the heli. A couple of gusts even elevated the heli a few meters higher eventhough i had reduced throttle. Then a sharp gust almost caused the heli to barrel roll into the ground. But i kept my cool and decided to persevere through. I was tempted to allo...

The generation of embedded aero tables from an automated process which uses Digital Datcom has now been checked. The phased approach was used. The longitudinal dynamics were checked first through effectively flying the glider ballistic in the pitch only. Once expected results were achieved, an initial sideslip (over 10 deg) was introduced at the start of the simulation causing the excitation of the lateral and directional aerodynamics. The checking of these was more tricky as one needs to have a good understanding of the geometrical effects of fixed-wing airplane on its aerodynamics. Below show some plots of the angle of attack and sideslip in a disturbed ballistic trajectory whereby all channels of the aircraft are excited. Given that now we have 6DOF simulation model with a complete aerodynamic model, flight control design and introduction of actuator dynamics can now proceed.

So decided to upload my coding scripts and share it with the world. I'm not officially in the #opensource business. One actually gets to realize that the only to harness an idea, is to throw it out in the open. #uav4africa #coding #movingup http://ift.tt/2f1HHqB via Instagram http://ift.tt/2equZ8k