News
Hardware in the loop attitude testing in simulator. (22-Nov-2006)
The simulator is calculating body frame magnetic and gravitational vectors based on the attitude of the aircraft in the simulator. These vectors are passed to the control board as if they where gps measurements, except they occur at 20Hz (or what ever is desired). The image below shows the onboard calculated attitude vs the simulator calculated actual attitude.
Made a physics simulator with GUI (24-Oct-2006)
Ok we've made a physics simulator so that we can test and analyse new control systems out before we fly. Theres not a lot of good flying days down in Dunedin, so it's been essential. It's also useful for learning the dynamics of an aircraft to make a control system. Here's a screenshot of the GUI.
Better development cabling. (18-Aug-2006)
The plane can now be programmed and debugged/talked-to using USB, with a much neater cabling design. It is also now USB bus powered, which is much easier. The red light indicating when power is sourced from the USB line.
New board design testing well. (28-Mar-2006)
The new board is proving to be more reliable. It's also smaller and lighter, with many more functions. Here's a picture showing that it is possible to etch the new design
More reliable AUTO/MANNED switching. (15-Dec-2005)
The original system prooved to be unreliable once the plane flew out of range, There was a small probability of the plane switching back into remotely piloted mode. So the original electronics (johnson counter, octal buffers and D-flip-flops) have been replaced with one small CPLD. This also means that a servo extension board can easily be accommodated run off one of the servo outputs, enabling the use of any number of PWM outputs.
GPS is up and running with logging. (10-Dec-2005)
The board has been modified so that it now includes a SD memory card slot so that all telemetry information can be easily stored and later recovered.
Flight testing of the attitude control has been successfull. (04-Oct-2005)
Heres a link to download the video footage (22MB) right-click the link > and select "save as" if you don't want it streaming.
