It’s been a long time since our last update. Sorry for not keeping up with the website during the summer, but it has been an extremely busy summer for the club. It’s hard to know where to begin. We will start with Sig3.
We finished construction of Sig3 after a semester of carefully thought out design and construction. It took its virgin flight at the beginning of summer in a RC flight testing its airworthiness. Everything was going well for about eight minutes into the flight when for no apparent reason the motor shut off. Brandon was at the sticks and was able to dead stick the plane into a runway approach. In the last turn before the plane could land it stalled and fell from the sky. The front end was smashed up pretty bad after the crash, but Cory and Brandon were able to rebuild the plane in less than a week.
The cause of the crash was blamed on the unreliable large glow motor used on the plane. We then purchased a Fuji Imvac gasoline motor and hoped that would be much more reliable and maintenance free. The next month and a half was spent breaking in the new motor and trying to work out the interference issues between the radio system and the electronic ignition system for the new motor. After weeks of various trial and error methods of eliminating the interference the gasoline engine was abandoned and a two stroke O.S. FT300 glow engine was swapped out. This engine had been used by the club for a long time and would run even if one of the cylinders stopped firing. With the engine installed and tested Sig3 was finally ready for autopilot integration. Time was running out before competition however and autonomous flight testing and configuration would have to wait until we were at the military airspace at Fort Benning. While installing the cameras in the plane a large flaw was found in the overall design of the plane. The saddle tanks that were mounted on the side of the plane prevented any cameras mounted in the large payload section from actually seeing anything through the sides of the fuselage. We then bought a large 64oz fuel tank and installed it internally in the plane and mounted the camera’s on the shelf above the autopilot. Gains and surfaces were then calibrated at a com range test was performed. Sig3 was then packed up into the van and driven to Georgia.
At the flyday in early summer Sig2 was flown for the first time since last years competition and was found to fly flawlessly. This plane was going to be the back up plane to Sig3 in the competition. Sig2 went under autopilot integration and was quickly finished. Gains and surfaces were calibrated and Sig2 was packed up and driven to Georgia.
Cal worked on the rover as was able to take the CAD design and make it a reality. All of components were able to be placed inside an inch and a half PVC tube except for the camera and transmitter. The rover was able to drive around and wall follow and therefore was a prototype proof of concept. We would unofficially attempt level 3 with the Rover.
Tracking antenna
This was not completed as hoped. By competition the antenna was able to accurately point at any GPS point fed into the program. It was not able to grab the GPS information from the piccolo software and therefore was unable to autonomously point at the plane during flight.