Wednesday, August 7, 2013

NASA final report submitted

The microgravity team just submitted our final report to NASA on the research that we did on the weightless wonder. Here is our team video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDTSGS88Kko

I expected to spend the entire night working on the report. I guess I will work on tuning the tricopter a bit more. I built a new small frame that seems to work well. I just need to get it as stable as the previous two frames.

Monday, August 5, 2013

Tricopter Update

A few days ago I destroyed the frame that I have been flying for the past two weeks. I made a nice pile of broken parts:
I'm running a kk2.0 board with 1.6++ firmware. I tried to do a flip with autolevel on. I stood the copter on its tail end and it fell to earth. A couple of days later I put together this thing:


Two dt700s in the front and a dt900 in the back. It flew for 15 minutes or so. The booms are made from ~4'x1.5"x0.5" balsa. After flying it once I have decided to rebuild it into a much smaller and lighter form. I'm going to work on it tonight and hopefully will have a smaller version built by tomorrow. The huge tricopter was a little too intimidating. The balsa arms were far too fragile also and they broke twice before I even got it off of the ground. I will try a version with stubby plywood arms this time.