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| The Cutoff |
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This page contants all of the news posts from the 2007 fall semester. Current news can be viewed at our 'home' page: Current News |
| Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 | Will Runge |
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Yesterday we had our Critical Design Review presentation and teleconference with the folks over at NASA-Marshall. It went very well overall. Everyone went through their slides smoothly. We had one minor technical glitch - the video in our presentation didn't work, and we also went slightly over time, but I don't think they minded because we had so much content to present. There was a brief question-and-answer session. They had a lot of questions about safety and our procedures for working with black powder and our rocket altimeters, to ensure that we don't blow ourselves up or crash our rocket. They were also dubious about our deployment mechanism, the sabot encasing for the UAV, despit the fact that it worked successfully last year. But overall they were very positive. They spent the first 2 or 3 minutes of the question and answer basically saying how good our work and our reports and our presentations have been. And they stressed that we ground test our standby systems on both the UAV and the rocket to ensure that they are indeed failsafe systems and not just additional liabilities. That, of course, is a given for this team. Anyway, now that that is over with, it's back to work in the lab and in the field. After the presentation of our Critical Design Review yesterday, Thomas Carroll finished building the Senior Telemaster, and hopefully we're going to load it up with the flight computer, some cameras and our wifi link, and then, if all the parts get in on time, we'll be flight testing the aircraft and our electronics systems starting next wednesday. In the picture from left to right, are Thomas Carroll, Will Runge (me!), and Matt Heller. The builder, the chief engineer, and the payload specialist. Systems we're hoping to test immediately include: the 2.4 GHz Wifi uplink to the UAV, the video feed from the digital (USB) reconnaissance camera, the video feed and range of our 900 MHz analog camera, and the pilotage of the aircraft by reference to a computer screen. That should be very exciting indeed!  The Rapid Prototyping machine also just finished "printing out" the wind tunnel model of our aircraft. A 1/6th-size scale model of our airplane, printed as ABS plastic, this model will be sanded smooth, assembled, and tested in the wind tunnel in various flight conditions for lift and drag. The model isn't assembled yet; the parts are fabricated but still have to be attached together, but I brought them all together for a few quick pictures. The wingspan on this little guy is 8". For comparison to what the actual airplane will look like, check out this schematic.   OK, that's it for now. I'm working feverishly to recruit another Computer Engineer or Computer Science major to work on our project, so hopefully we'll hear back about that sometime soon. This afternoon I'll be updating and re-writing the Media section to contain all the pictures we've been taking recently (Right now it's all pictures from last year), so be sure to swing by there when you get the chance. Other than that, happy Friday! |
| Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 | Will Runge |
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This morning was a long time ago, and we got so much work done today that I just had to make another post. First off, I updated the UAV and Rocket pages, adding a lot more content and information to each one. So swing by there and read up! Secondly, there was a bunch of stuff going on in the lab this afternoon, and I wanted to post some pictures and progress. Rapid Prototyping the Wind Tunnel Model For an independent research project, Bowden is going to do a series of wind tunnel tests on a scale model of our airplane. He drew our airplane at 1/6th scale in ProEngineer (8" wingspan) to be built by the department's Rapid Prototyping machine. A Rapid Prototyping machine, for the uninitiated, is basically a 3-Dimensional printer that costs a couple hundred thousand dollars. It rapidly produces a model in 3 dimensions for testing or visualization purposes. Once the model is done and and assembled, Bowden will be putting it into the Vanderbilt Wind Tunnel to study the lift and drag. Should be interesting. Here it is about 20 minutes into the process. The fuselage is on the far right, the wing is in the middle, and the two halves of the V-Tail are at the left. Sorry for all the glare, the machine is enclosed and we're shooting pictures through a piece of plexiglass probably half an inch thick.  And here it is a few hours later, probably almost 1/2 way done judging by the fuselage.  Building the Telemaster, and the Competition UAV Ben, who's designing and building the nose of our Competition UAV, was in the lab for several hours working on putting a mockup of that together. We're trying to decide how to make the nose - a hollow carbon fiber cowl? A balsa/plywood buildup? A fiberglass and foam assembly? Right now he's doing a plywood buildup, we'll see how it comes up. At the same time, Ryan is putting the finishing touches on our Telemaster. It is to be flight-ready by this weekend, and then we're going to install all of the electronics into it for flight testing. In this picture he was working on mounting the battery box, I believe.  Laying up some rocket fins Finally, the rocket group is making another go at laying up some carbon fiber fins, since the last ones didn't come out very nice. Zach, Tyler, and Erin were all in this afternoon, cutting up some of our thick 15.6 oz CF, cleaning off our glass pieces, and getting set up for that. Here's a shot of Tyler and Zach cutting the CF for the fins.  OK, well that's it for now. Lots going on, it's starting to get really exciting. As I realized earlier this morning, the Flight Readiness Review is just 6 weeks away. And, equally exciting, our competition launch is just 10 short weeks away. It's crunch time!! |
| Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 | Will Runge |
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Well, in the process of reworking the CDR presentation, I put together some pretty nice fault tree diagrams for the failure modes of the electronics onboard the UAV. They're included in the CDR presentation which you can find in the post below this or in the CDR section of this website, but I figured I'd upload them here so so people can see our train of thought without having to go through the whole 35-slide powerpoint. I traced the failure modes from 3 of our central systems - the Navigational Camera (900 MHz), the Wifi uplink, and the Single Board Computer. Starting with the failure of each of these devices/systems, I traced out what would happen if various other systems failed or worked. I omitted Control surface failure; if we have a control surface failure, and the plane is uncontrollable, we'll be deploying the BRS parachute remotely. Navigational Camera Fails-  Wifi Uplink Fails -  Single Board Computer (SBC) Fails -  And, yeah, if you haven't looked through our CDR presentation, you should take a look, because it's pretty awesome. And it also provides a brief overview of our project with just enough detail to let you know how little we sleep. 2008-2009 USLI CDR Presentation. |
| Monday, February 2nd, 2009 | Will Runge |
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On the recommendation of our faculty advisor, Dr. Anilkumar, I redid our CDR PowerPoint presentation. On Thursday, we're having a teleconference with the folks over at NASA, and he wanted to make sure the powerpoint was really top-notch. So I spent many hours over the course of the last week or so reworking that and adding a lot of content. It actually ended up being a bit content-heavy, but I'm pretty happy with it on the whole. You can download it below: 2008-2009 USLI CDR Presentation. Matt and I also spent some time this weekend ordering most of the hardware we'll need on the ground and in the air to make all of this work. During the course of researching all the various equipment we were ordering, we made a few minor design changes: Forward Facing Camera --> 900 mHz Analog We decided to put the forward facing camera on an analog transmitter. This way, if the somewhat finicky Wifi uplink fails, we'll still have the view from the forward-facing camera, which should be enough to safely pilot the aircraft. Originally we'd planned to use digital for one or both of the cameras. The camera we picked out, a Sony KX-191 has 550 lines of pixels, and transmits on 900 mHz. We've got a 8dBi antenna for that. Reconnaissance Camera --> Digital We'd thought about using an analog transmitter for our reconnaissance camera. But, as it turns out, most of the analog transmitters out there are pretty low bandwidth - not sufficiently high bandwidth to handle a 10 megapixel camera. So we'll either be converting analog-to-digital from our Exilim Z-300, or using a USB camera (such as our 2 megapixel Logitec webcamera). We also picked up some miscellaneous hardware; - a 28 dBi grid antenna for the Wifi connection - a 2.4 gHz USB-stick Wifi card - all the 900 mHz hardware - the sony KX-191 and a USB connection to send that video feed into the computer - a really nice tilt-pan gimbal for the KX-191, including servos - some screen hoods so that we can use our laptops in bright sunlight - and a bunch of othe random stuff. Over the next few weeks, while we built the 2nd UAV, we'll hopefully be assembling some of the electronics suite and flying it onboard our Senior Telemaster. Stay tuned! |
| Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 | Will Runge |
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This afternoon we gave a brief presentation in the Senior Design Seminar. We put together a short slideshow and talked for about 10 minutes about our project. The slideshow is pretty straightforward, but it looks pretty nice and has just about every interesting picture we've created for our club so far. Check it out below: 1/27/2009 Senior Design Presentation. |
| Sunday, January 25th, 2009 | Will Runge |
Even though we were putting in some very long days and nights to finish up the CDR in the days and weeks leading up to Thursday, we're back at it already, making progress on a number of different fronts. Here's a picture from last Wednesday's deployment testing. This testing is done to verify the amount of black powder that isn eeded to separate the various rocket sections to deploy parachutes and the UAV.  Another picture from the Deployment Testing on Wednesday....  Here's a picture of Keith with his Vacuum Altimeter Test Chamber. Keith is the newest member to join the team. This mini-project, which he assembled over the last week or two, will allow the team to test and calibrate their barometric altimeters. We tested it out last night and it was working like a charm.  I spent some time this afternoon dismembering our Fluke 568 infrared thermometer. Here it is, after I finally got the protective casing off. This device will be rigidly mounted to our downward-facing reconnaissance camera, the Exilim Z300, and it will read out the temperature of whatever the camera is pointed towards, via a direct USB link to the flight computer.  Here's another shot of the Fluke 568, completely stripped down, alongside the Exilim Z300. After all the external casing and all unnecessary parts were removed, the IR Thermometer weighed just 0.25 lbs, which is even lighter than I'd hoped! Well, that's it for now. On Monday night we're meeting to plan out the fabrication and assembly of our next UAV, which will feature a V-Tail, a folding propeller, and hopefully retractable landing gear. This evening I'm leaving for UT Austin, to visit their graduate program in Aerospace Engineering and make some contacts there. As soon as I get back, we're diving head-first into building this next airplane, so stay tuned! |
| Saturday, January 24th, 2009 | Will Runge |
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After uploading the CDR on Thursday, I had to run off to Atlanta to make a visit to Georgia Tech, where I'm hoping to attend graduate school. Now that I'm back from that, I figured I'd go ahead share some info from the CDR. In the course of writing that report over the last several weeks, we had a number of revelations, and also put together some tidy graphics. So here goes. Ducted Fan: No More! First off, the whole ducted fan idea has basically gone out the window. This one comes with a story. When we went to flight test the First Proof of Concept UAV (POC#1), while we were there, a guy named Bruce was talking a lot about gliders. Eventually he pulled out his own R/C glider. In order to be able to launch the aircraft and stay aloft between thermals, he had a folding propeller that, when in use, popped out like a normal propeller, and then for gliding, it folded in against the fuselage in a minimum-drag configuration. About 2 days after meeting him and seeing his folding-propeller-glider, I basically fell out of my chair when I realized the potential. As it turns out, folding propellers can be had in just about any common propeller size. The original idea of using an electric ducted fan onboard our aircraft was that a conventional propeller would not fit inside the rocket body tube because of our large wing chord. The electric ducted fan would provide sufficient thrust, but it required a huge amount of extra complexity - designing and building the inlet and exhaust ducts, whose geometry can have a dramatic impact on the efficiency of the fan. And also, the EDF has to spin at much higher RPM's - on the order of 20,000+ RPM, compared to 4,000-5,000 RPM for a conventional propeller - to produce as much thrust as a similarly-powered conventional propeller. This causes an EDF to use up battery power faster than a normal brushless motor would. All of this amounts to a whole lot of extra complexity, difficulty of implementation, and reliability and battery life considerations compared to a normal propeller. A folding propeller gets us the best of both worlds; it fits in the rocket, it's better for battery life, and it's simlper to implement and safer to flight test. In short, it's better in every way possible. So our competition plane, it has been decided, will be powered by a folding propeller and conventional brushless DC motor, rather than a VASAFAN electric ducted fan and high-rpm dc motor. Ballistic Recovery System? The second major idea that's been tossed around a lot recently is a ballistic parachute. This idea came about for two reasons. First of all, when we realized that we didn't have to use an electric ducted fan for propulsion, we all of a sudden were presented with a lot more room in the fuselage and tail of the aircraft. If we had used a ducted fan on our competition airplane, the entire tail-end of the fuselage would have to be open space - the exhaust ducting for the fan. Now, since we're using a nose-mounted folding propeller, we have a whole lot more space available to us in the tail to use for some kind of payload. The perfect place for a ballistic-recovery parachute to be tucked away. The second reason the idea came about was when we were putting together a complete list of our failure modes. In the unlikely event that our Wifi uplink to the airplane fails, we'll have a standby 2.4 ghz receiver which can be used by the pilot to take over and land the plane. And we'll have the analog video feed from the reconnaissance camera. But that may or may not be enough to fly the airplane safely, especially if we don't have visual contact. If we install a ballistic recovery system (BRS) into our airplane, then if we lose the wifi uplink in flight, without visual contact, and determine that we cannot safely land the airplane, then we can simply deploy the parachute - probably a 3'-diameter rocket-type nylon parachute - using a spare channel on our transmitter and an electric match and black powder charge same as in the rocket, allowing the UAV to land safely to be flown another day. So we're strongly investigating that possibility. V-Tail! The third innovation was the V-Tail. A V-Tail can ostensibly be folded back behind the tail when not in use - to be packaged in the rocket - much more easily than with a conventional tail. It's also lower drag, and potentially lighter than a conventional tail. So our next plane will have a V-Tail empennage. Retractable Landing Gear!! The final innovation is that we've found a great retract kit for landing gear, so we're going to try and install retractable landing gear into the wing of our next airplane, so that during flight and when the airplane is inside the rocket, the landing gear can be tucked away, and then deployed only for landing, again reducing drag and improving flight performance. It may or may not end up on the final product, but we're going to give it a shot over the next we weeks as we build our next UAV. So, as you can see, we've made a lot of big decisions and design changes over the last few weeks. Now here are some pretty pictures that reflect what we've been up to.  This is the Pro/E dimensional drawing of the Proof of Concept UAV, which is built and has been successfully test-flown. Units in Inches.  This picture explains the range of an Infrared Thermometer. Infrared thermometers, aka non-contact "spot" thermometers, measure the average temperature across a spot. The area of that spot is dependent upon how far the target is away from the thermometer. Our IR Thermometer, the Fluke 568, has a Distance-to-Spot ratio of 50:1. This means, if we want to measure the average temperature across a 6-foot diameter circle - such as the hood of a truck - then we can ostensibly be flying 300' off the ground.  This diagram shows roughly how we're hoping to mount the infrared thermometer. It is to be aligned with the camera so that, at a given [fixed] altitude, the IR thermometer will point at the center of the view frame of the camera. This way, by pointing the camera at an area of interest (via the camera gimbal), the IR thermometer will read off the temperature of that object.  This is a picture of a +5g wing loading scenario in NASTRAN/PATRAN, a Finite Element Analysis software. Here the wing is split into halves, and a +2.5g (e.g. 2.5 * weight of the UAV) load is applied to the wing. NASTRAN outputs the stresses in the wing, point loads at any given position, and an indication of the deflection that is to be expected. Our model needs some work, but it's a start.  Here is a late-night picture of Kyser performing an actual static 3g wing-loading test on the wing from POC#1. In a static wing-loading test, the weight of the plane under various flight regimes (e.g. +1g for cruise flight, +3g for mild aerobatics, +5g for an extreme aerobatics case) is loaded onto the wing in the form of sand bags or concrete bags. Deflection is measured, and it is demonstrated that the wing will stand up to any loading that the aircraft can be expected to encounter. Gotta love those lab goggles and the jumpsuit.  And this is a Pro/E Dimensional drawing of our Competition UAV as it stands now. (Units in Inches.) Note the V-Tail design, the square cross-section-fuselage, and the propeller on the nose. These reflect a few of the major design decisions we have made over the past few weeks. The Folding propeller, as described above, resolves a number of different problems originally presented by the idea of using the VASAFAN. The V-tail permits normal empennage dimensions (via folding V-tail), and the square fuselage cross-section will give us more room than we had inside POC#1 and make it easier to tidily install the payload. OK, that's it for now. Lots of exciting stuff going on. We're going to be building our next airplane - potentially the Competition UAV if it comes out nice - over the next few weeks. We're also hoping to flight-test our rocket and UAV combo in about a month. And the Telemaster for flight-testing the electroncis suite is basically built, so we'll be able to begin flight testing the electronics in the next few weeks as Matt Heller starts to get that package pieced together. Stay tuned! |
| Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 | Will Runge |
The CDR is finished at last. If you wish to view it, go to the CDR section. It weighs in at about 165 pages, before the appendix. With the Appendix (provided as a separate download), it comes out to 297 pages, if I recall correctly. If you're in the mood for a little light reading, follow the below link --
2008-2009 USLI CDR |
| Monday, January 19th, 2009 | Will Runge |
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I finally got the video transferred off the camera and to my computer. For convenience sake, I've uploaded it to YouTube to be viewed by the masses. I trimmed out some of the middle of the flight; what you're left with is a 1 minute clip of the takeoff, two quick flybys, and then Randy's beautiful landing. Enjoy! |
| Sunday, January 18th, 2009 | Will Runge |
Today we completed the flight testing of POC#1. Again at the hands of ace test pilot Randy Moore, the aircraft took to the sky with a little bit of tweaking. During the course of a 4-minute flight, he flew around the pattern several times, made several low fly-bys of myself and Tyler, who were manning the cameras, and then executed a perfect landing. He reported that the plane flew slightly nose-heavy, and that it was over-weight, but overall it was a good-flying airplane. Because of the airplane's large weight, he had to fly at full throttle for basically the duration of the flight, which is why the flight duration was rather short. There was one scary instance early on in the flight; Randy was working on trimming out the ailerons, and all of a sudden the airplane nosed up, stalled, and started to spiral. He made a clean recovery, and after that the flight was basically flawless. Randy made a couple of recommendations: move the center of gravity back, add a steerable tailwheel, and try to decrease overall weight. But, on the whole, he said it was a decent airplane. Not bad for a first attempt! Here it is on the rack, while we do the Range test and make sure all of the servos and control surfaces are responding as desired.  Takeoff!  On the departure leg....  Runway fly-over.  Another fly-over.  Coming in for a successful landing!  Intact after a great landing. Unfortunately, the belly camera did not work; it must have been damaged in the crash on Friday. Tyler took some great video, though, so I'm working on uploading that right now. The CDR is due on Thursday, so we'll be busy with that for the next few days, but we're going to start building POC#2 in the next week or so. Stay tuned! |
| Friday, January 16, 2009 | Will Runge |
Today, our airplane FLEW! This morning, after weeks spent designing, and then almost two months spent in fabrication, followed by 2 weeks of flight-testing delays due to weather, our first UAV, POC#1, took to the air. With Randy Moore - a member of the Nashville RC Aviators - at the controls, and after a few minutes spent tweaking the landing gear and the motor to get the ideal takeoff conditions, our airplane rolled down the runway and took to the air. The flight was brief. Unfortunately, there was a radio malfunction. We accidentally had installed one of our lower-quality receivers into the airplane, and so despite Randy's expert flying, the airplane got out of range and crashed after the brief maiden flight. He said the plane was flying great. It was a little bit heavy, but the handling was fantastic and after a little bit of trimming, it was flying like a pro. If only we'd installed a top-notch receiver! Needless to say, the mistake was one that will not be made again. Fortunately, the damage was minimal. The wing cracked at the left aileron slot, the front of the fuselage was slightly cracked, and the nose was bent out of position. The plane was carrying one of our small wireless 4.2ghz color cameras, so as soon as Thomas Carroll gets back to campus we'll be checking out that video. And Robin recorded the entire flight. Once I get this DVR camera figured out I'll be uploading that. Anyway, here are the pictures. 
 To be honest, the damage looks a lot worse than it is. The wing is already repaired, and after a bit of sanding, it'll be ready for a new paintjob. The fuselage damage is minimal - a little bit of reinforcing carbon fiber and it'll be flightworthy. And the nose is essentially undamaged; it just got knocked out of position during the crash. Considering the conditions of the crash - full throttle nose over into the ground - the damage is pretty negligible. Our construction is solid. The plane is already mostly repaired. Provided this nice weather holds, we're going back on Sunday morning to set the record straight. Again Randy Moore will take the initial flight, but after he gets it all set up, maybe I'll be able to take the controls. Stay tuned for more test flight results, and hopefully, some in-flight video! |
| Thursday, January 15, 2009 | Will Runge |
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Unfortunately, we were unable to fly on Wednesday; it was too windy. We went out nonetheless, and gained lots of great advice from the 'Old Guys' group of the Nashville Aviators R/C club. They had a lot of minor suggestions to improve our First Proof of Concept UAV. Originally the surface hinges were epoxied into place. They recommended screwing them through the fiberglass and into the foam for an extra-secure fit. We also had our control horns mis-positioned; they told us exactly where to put each one. They also suggested an improvement for the linkage that joins the two elevators and allows a single servo to control both. We're working right now to make the requested changes, and tomorrow morning bright and early we're going out to fly. While Thomas Carroll makes the improvements to POC#1, Ryan is working to ready the big Telemaster for flight. This 8-foot wingspan aircraft was bought 'ready-built' from Hobby Lobby. Equipped with a beefed-up motor, propeller, and battery, this aircraft will function as the flying testbed for our electronics. We are going to take it on its maiden flight tomorrow. If we have time tonight, we're going to install one of the old wirelesss cameras, on a tilt-pan gimbal, so that we can record some video while we fly the Telemaster. It will be a pretty interesting morning. Here are a few pics of us at work. 
 
 The first two pictues show myself, Thomas Carroll, and others prepping the plane for the cancelled flight, and demonstrating to the old guys the control surface movement. The 3rd picture shows Thomas Carroll making the requested adjustments to POC#1, in this case, screwing in the rudder hinges and horn. And the 4th picture shows Ryan knee-deep in the assembly of our 8' Telemaster. |
| Wednesday, January 14, 2009 | Will Runge |
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This plane is finally ready to fly! We're going out this afternoon to put it to the test. For now, I've got a few pictures of the finished product that I wanted to show off before we break the thing. It weighs in at 4.93 lbs. It has a 48" wingspan, and an 8" chord length. It is powered by an AXI 2820/12 brushless DC motor, a 10x7 carbon fiber propeller, and a 3850-mAh, 3-cell lithium-polymer battery. Aileron servos are Hitec HS-55's, and elevator/rudder are Hitech HS-65HB servos. The main fuselage is made of carbon fiber. The tail is hollow fiberglass, and the tail surfaces as well as the wing are fiberglass on marine foam. Because of an aft-cg problem, we had to extend the fuselage forward by about 3 inches to move the motor weight forward. Paintjob is by yours truly, except for the nose. The nose was painted by Thomas Carroll. On the record, I hate the flames. We put it to a vote and I lost, hence the silly-looking nose. This is me (Will Runge) and Ben Havrilesko, posing with the finished plane -  And here are a few glamour shots - 
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| Thursday, January 8, 2009 | Will Runge |
Well, it was only a few hours ago that I posted that last update, but I finished painting the plane a few minutes ago and I just had to show it off. The carbon fiber is left exposed, because it is nice-looking. Everything else is painted black. The leading edge of the wing, the horizontal tail, and the vertical tail are all gold. And the ailerons, the rudder, and the elevators are all solid gold. I think it came out pretty nice. You be the judge.
 Here it is, all masked off, ready for the gold finish.   And, on an unrelated note, here's a shot of Ben working on the motor mount for this airplane. 
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| Thursday, January 8, 2009 | Will Runge |
I just finished making a new logo for our project, so I thought I'd go ahead and show it off. We're thinking about investing in some matching t-shirts or polos, and so the first step for that was to make a proper logo. Here's what I came up with -  I also added a brief "Project Summary" to the top of this page, to give new visitors to this website a good 'big picture' idea of this project. Anyway, that's all for now. The First Proof of Concept aircraft will hopefully be flight-worthy by tomorrow, so expect to see some pictures of that in the near future! |
| Monday, January 5, 2009 | Ben Havrilesko |
Happy New Year! It's great to be back in Nashville. Will, Thomas Bowden, and I are hard at work in the lab perfecting the POC#1 prototype. Thomas has
applied fiberglass to the full wing assebly as you can see below. Next ailerons must be cut out, servos installed, and the wing will be sanded to a smooth finish.  We're working with some issues involving our center of gravity. The empennage ended up being a lot heavier than intended, and the motor is relatively light, so we may end up having to add a little bit of ballast to give this airplane stable flight characteristics. Anyway, here is a picture of the wing resting in place on top of the fuselage.  It looks like the weather tomorrow may be dicey, so we might not get to fly this thing immediately, but at the very least we've learned a lot through the construction process, and before long we'll be starting in on designing and building the second Proof of Concept airplane. More on that later. |
| Tuesday, December 23 | Will Runge |
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Well, I'm back home now. We didn't quite make our goal of having the first Proof of Concept airplane flying before break. However, most of the major assembly stuff is done. Remaining tasks include mounting the motor, installing the battery and receiver, and fiberglassing the wing and intalling its servos. Anyway, as I mentioned last Friday, for my final project in Intermediate Fluid Mechanics, I modeled our wing in 3 dimensions, in a cruise configuration and in an approach configurations. The project shed a lot of insight on how wings work, on the particulars of our airfoil and wing design, and also produced several pretty pictures. This is a contour graph of the pressures on the top of the wing, for the approach configuration.  Here's the pressure contour on the bottom of the wing, for the approach configuration.  This is an interesting plot of vorticity on the wing surface, at the wing tip, and at a point 2 inches inboard from the tip, for the approach configuration.  And this is the velocity contour at the center of the wing, in cross-section, for the cruise configuration.  Finally, this picture shows the velocity contours at the center of the wing, at a point 2" inboard from the tip, and at the tip of the wing, for the approach configuration. The wing geometry was made visible to orient the viewer.  If you'd like to read the 55-page report in full, it can be viewed Here. When I get back to school in the spring, I'm hoping to model the entire geometry of the UAV in several different flow conditions, in order to help us place and size the inlet duct for the propulsion system on the UAV. More on that later. My next post probably won't be until we're all back on campus, around January 6th, by which time the first Proof of Concept UAV will hopefully be flying or at least flight-ready. |
| Friday, December 18 | Will Runge |
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Exams are over. It's Christmas Break, and yet here we are, working hard to get the first 'Proof of Concept' airplane flying. Everyone's been working hard to help get the job done. Keith spent a few hours in the lab today working on putting together a vacuum chamber for testing our altimeters. Kyser and I basically lived in the lab for the last few days. He made the empennage and shaped a wing. I cut a hatch in the fuselage, installed the control surfaces on the horizontal stabilizer and vertical stabilizer, attached the tail surfaces to the empennage, and attached the empennage to the fuselage. Ben made the horizontal stabilizer. Bowden made the vertical stabilizer. Matt helped put together a hotwire, and has been working on testing out some software and hardware ideas for our flight electronics package. Just about everyone has put in several hours over the last few weeks.
Here are some pictures from the last week or two. Thomas Carroll, shaping half of a wing.  Tyler, our master craftsman, fiberglassing a wing.  Double-glassing the leading edge for added strength.  Matt and Bowden, and their foam-cutting creation, nick-named the "Cancer Machine" for all the smoke the foam gives off when it is melted by the wire.  Bowden shows off his handiwork on the Vertical Stabilizer.  Bowden gives a brief dissertation on the functional merits of his 'Cancer Machine' foam-cutting hotwire.  Now it's ready for a little sanding work.  The Vertical Stabilizer, ready to have the hinges, servo, and horn installed.  Dry-fitting it all together.  Horizontal Stabilizer, ready for flight.  Vertical Stabilizer, ready for flight.  Kyser sizes up the possibility of a wing carved from the pink foam.  Getting ready to cut the main hatch in the fuselage for installing/removing the battery and other internals.  The big cut.  Installing the framework for the hatch attachment and removal.  The finished hatch, in place.  The hatch is off, ready for the battery to be loaded.  Cutting the Empennage to accept the tail surfaces.  Dry-fitting the tail surfaces into place.  Ready to be fiberglassed.  The tail is fiberglassed!  OK, that's enough for now. I'm also just now finishing up my final project in Prof. Luo's class. I modeled the flow around our wing (NACA 4415, b=24", c=8") in 3D, under two flow conditions - cruise flight and approach conditions. Put together lots of pretty pictures, and hopefully tomorrow I'll post a few of those, and maybe even upload the report for your reading pleasure. I'm headed out tomorrow morning, but with any luck we'll get the wing fiberglassed tonight, and then the first proof of concept airplane will be basically ready for flight when we return for the spring semester. Happy Holidays! |
| Saturday, December 6 | Will Runge |
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Well, as I mentioned yesterday, the PDR is done with, and so now we're back to fabrication. The current goal is to have our first 'Proof of Concept' airplane completely built and flying by mid this week, so that we can take it out to Peeler Park and fly with the old guys, and see if any of these textbooks are worth the hundreds of dollars that they cost. So hopefully in the next few days I'll have pictures of our finished first Proof of Concept UAV. And then I'll have a picture of it flying, so that'll be nice. In the meantime, I wanted to upload some of the pretty pictures from our PDR. I know not everyone who views this site will take the time to go through the (250 page!) document, so I figured I'd pull out a few of my favorite pictures, and post them here with a short description. So here goes. [If you want to read the PDR in all it's glory, click Here.] This is a diagram I made a few weeks back, showing how we're thinking the pilot's interface will look on his computer screen. The main feature is the view from the forward-facing camera. The pilot is also provided with a moving map GPS showing his location, a representation of the orientation of the airplane based on the angle rate sensors and accelerometers, and the numerical readout from each of the critical flight sensors.  This is a schematic of how the internal ducted fan works. Kyser put this one together, and I really like how it came out. It shows air being drawn into the duct (mounted on the bottom in this picture), and then being exhausted out the tail of the aircraft after passing through a VASAFAN 65mm electric ducted fan.  This is an output graph from Profili, showing our chosen wing, NACA 4415, and the lift and drag curves at various Reynolds numbers.  This is a diagram showing a Pro/E drawing of the current design for our Competition UAV, packaged in its body tube ready for launch.  This is a rough sketch of what we're thinking the Competition UAV will look like. ProE drawing by Bowden. Funky, eh?  This is a drawing I made showing our Deployment Subsystem, in particular showing what parachutes deploy when, showing how the Sabot works, etc.  This is a drawing that Kyser made of the Altimeter Test chamber - basically a small vacuum chamber - that we're going to build to ensure that our altimeters are functional. He's getting good in Photoshop.  And this is a ProE drawing of the rocket, with a few critical dimensions shown. Ty made this Pro/E model for us, and it really came out great! Bowden put together the schematic and measurements. Units are in Inches.  This is a functional block diagram of how the electronics onboard the UAV will function. Matt Heller put this one together using Visio.  And finally, this is a schematic showing how the different ground systems will interface together to make our Ground Station. Again, Matt Heller's handiwork.  Anyway, that's all for now. Happy viewing. Soon you'll get to see some our composites handiwork, hopefully in the form of a completed first Proof of Concept UAV. |
| Friday, December 5 | Will Runge |
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We just finished our Preliminary Design Review. Total length is about 250 pages. We wrote 110 pages or so, and the remainder is appendices. If you're in the mood for a little light reading, sneak a peek: 2008-2009 Vanderbilt USLI PDR |
| Monday, November 24 | Will Runge |
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Well, it's Thanksgiving break now, so most of us are back at home. Thomas Bowden lives in Nashville, so he is going to be spending his free time over the break fabricating parts for the 'Proof of Concept' aircraft. Thomas Carroll will also be in town, for practices with the football team, and he will be helping Bowden out. Matt took home a bunch of our electronics stuff home to work on, will be working on developing the flight and ground station software, and is putting together an ordering list of all the parts he'll need to begin assembling the flight computer systems. I met with Prof. Luo last week, and we finished up the design for the Fluent studies that I will be conducting to design the inlet duct for the final aircraft and ensure that it is low-drag and effective. Additionally, Kyser and I have arranged to get back to campus early; we're all hoping to capitalize on the extra free time provided by Thanksgiving break. I met with most of our members on Friday or Saturday, in hopes that most people will be able to get things done over break, and to delegate some of the tasks for writing the PDR, whose December 5th due date is rapidly approaching. On the whole, the team is working very efficiently, and I have high hopes that we'll be able to accomplish all of the ambitious goals we've set out for ourselves. I think there's a good chance that we'll have the 'Proof of Concept' UAV flying by the end of next week, and right around that time some of the remaining design decisions regarding the competition UAV will be made, and we'll start fabricating the body parts for that aircraft. Academically-speaking, next semester is looking relatively easy for most of us, which is great because the demands of our project are really spooling up and we're all anxious to be able to invest more time in the project. |
| Friday, November 21 | Ben Havrilesko |
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Good evening from your new web master. My name is Ben Havrilesko, and I'll be taking over the reigns from Will to report on the progress of our undertaking. I've volunteered for the task to take some stress off of will, as well as to learn the html language. I also spend my time working on the fiberglass construction method. I'm interested in exploring the acoustics of the UAV to reduce vibrations for better imaging resolution. My associates and I will be working on the payload for the rocket as well as on the rocket itself for the next 3 months. We're looking at a lot of work, but we're confident the job will be completed exceptionally. Current work is going toward production of a test UAV. We wish to prove that it will be possible for us to build such a machine from scratch. We intend to attach fiberglass, foam core wings to a carbon fiber fuselage. A ducted fan will provide thrust, servo motors attached to moveable surfaces on the wings and tail will provide maneuvering abilities, and both will be controlled via a radio remote from the ground. We are not planning to mount any of the scientific payload at this point. Once we have proven the ability to produce controlled flight, the expensive gadgets will follow. We're really starting to dive into the reporting now. All the recording of specifications has forced us all to get on the same page about what exactly each of us is doing. We've got a really good idea of where we need to go, and a lot of confidence that we'll be able to get there. |
| Wednesday, November 19 | Will Runge |
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Today Tyler and Keith accompanied me out to Peeler Park, where we met the Music City Aviators club. Formed in 1975, the club unites R/C enthusiasts from all around the Nashville area. The club has it's own r/c-only airport, Peeler Park, which doubles as a Metro park, and they boast that it is one of the best r/c airports in the country. It features a club house, several hangars, and a 400-foot-long, 50-foot-wide runway. We took some of our off-the-shelf trainers with us in hopes of flying, but unfortunately it was too windy. Nonetheless, we had great fun talking with their Wednesday gathering, a group of retired members who call themselves the 'old farts.' Many of the members design and build their own airplanes, and we learned alot just from talking to them. They will be a useful reference in the future. In addition to the club having lots of great advice about building strong, lightweight airplanes, their airport will certainly also be of great use when it comes to flight testing our UAV's. Furthermore, if needed, we can have one of their experienced pilot's take the controls for the first few flights of the airplanes we'll be building. I attached a few photos of Peeler Park, the club's airport, which is the ideal location for flying R/C airplanes. I also included a satellite picture from Google Maps. This will be a great place for us to test-fly our UAV.    The Music City Aviators have their own website, located at: MusicCityAviators.com. Their president, Charles Waterston, was very cordial and helpful in giving directions, introducing us to members whose knowledge and interests coincide with our own, and educating us about the club and it's numerous activities. |
| Monday, November 17 | Will Runge |
Just wanted to check in briefly. Bowden has basically completed the Pro-E model of the 'Proof of Concept' airplane. It is complete with moving control surfaces, servos, servo linkages, a motor, several bulkheads, an empennage, and even a propeller. It's pretty sharp looking, and it will be a useful reference when it comes to actually fabricating the wing, fuselage, motor cowl, and empennage shapes. Here are a few pictures --
 The wing is a NACA 4415, with a 2 degree dihedral, and a 4 degree angle of incidence. The tail surfaces are based on NACA 0009 airfoils. There is no angle of incidence for the horizontal stabilizer; it will have to be trimmed out at this point with some usage of the elevators. Right now we're hoping to fabricate the empennage such that different tail surfaces can be changed in and out if necessary. It is to be powered by an electric motor, and have a hollow fiberglass empennage, with fiberglass-on-foam wings, and a hollow carbon fiber empennage. The motor cowl is to be made of fiberglass as well. With any luck, fabrication will begin this week, and the aircraft will be flying by the week after thanksgiving. |
| Friday, November 14 | Will Runge |
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Well, NASA returned our old Proposal for the USLI competition and asked us to take another look. Kyser, Thomas, and I spent most of the past week working on that. At first we were upset that they hadn't liked our proposal the first time around, but in retrospect they really were doing us a favor. The new Proposal is a lot better than the old one, and the rejection served as a great warning that we really have a lot of room for improvement in our report writing. In any case, the new Proposal is leagues better than the old one, and we now know that we are going to be putting a lot more time and effort into our report writing. The new and improved proposal can be viewed Here. In the course of helping to write that report, I put together a pretty nice little diagram of our deployment scheme for the UAV. It's all detailed in the Proposal, but I liked the graphic, so I thought I'd display it here. Basically, the airplane is designed with a high-wing. The wing is one piece, and it is fixed on a spring-loaded rotating mechanism in the top of the airplane. When the pyro charge deploys the UAV from inside the rocket, the wing rotates and locks into place perpendicular to the fuselage of the airplane. While the UAV is contained inside of the rocket, it is held in place by a protective foam sabot, made out of the same foam that we shape to lay the wings and fuselage of the aircraft design. The sabot damps the impact to the UAV, and pushes the nosecone off of the rocket when the pyro detonates, to ensure that the UAV is deployed from the rocket without suffering any damage. See the graphic below --  Aside from writing that 140 page report, there has been a lot going on in the lab, especially with respect to design and fabrication. Tyler laid some fiberglass on top of his prototype foam wing, and the results are astonishing. He used 2.8 oz/sq. yd. fiberglass, with a double layer on the leading edge for extra strength. Sanded down, the finish is amazing, and with a little paint this will make for a very nice wing fabrication method. Below is a picture of the 'glassed wing.  Finally, we've been hard at work designing our 'Proof of Concept' UAV. The basic design is entirely laid out at this point, including the motor to be used, the battery size and location, the wing, the fuselage, and the empennage, as well as the sizes for all of the control surfaces and the location of the sevros to manipulate the various control surfaces. Most of the design was put together by Thomas Bowden and myself, although everyone had lots of input, and with ample advice from Dr. Anilkumar. The wing is to be a NACA 4415, with a 2 degree dihedral, a 4 degree angle of incidence, an 8 inch chord, and a 48" span. This 'Proof of Concept' UAV is to have an electric DC brushless motor, propeller-driven, and with the same manufacturing techniques to be used on the airframe as will be used for our final UAV. Now that the preliminary calculations and sketches are complete, Thomas Bowden is drawing the wing in ProE to ensure that everything will fit where it is supposed to, as an aid in fabricating the actual wing, and for publicity purposes. We may also end up rapid-prototyping the airplane or some portion of it to put into the water tunnel or wind tunnel to study what the flow looks like around it and whether it actually performs as intended. Below is a screen-shot of the wing from Pro-E, complete with ailerons, servos, control hinges, the servo linkage horn, and servo linkages.  
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| Friday, October 30 | Will Runge |
We are progressing steading towards our goal of designing a flyable UAV. Everyone has been working diligently towards their respective tasks. Matt Heller has been designing the flight computer for the UAV, and he hopes to start assembling it in the coming weeks. Thomas Carroll is doing a lot of research on digital cameras and infrared cameras to see what is available, and talking to Matt about various data formats, intefacing the camera to the flight computer, etc. Tyler and Ben laid up some fiberglass on foam, with different surface preparations on the foam, to see which surface preparation is best for our needs. They're experimenting with differentp primers to ready the surface for bonding to fiberglass. Below is one of their experiments, comparing 3 different surface preparations.
Thomas Bowden recently laid up half of a carbon fiber wing. It came out pretty well, and more was learned about working with carbon fiber, which is somewhat more difficult than working with fiberglass. The wing doesn't have the glossy surface we hope for, but that is a purely aesthetic shortcoming. It is fairly strong, and relatively light weight. There is still some trimming and surface preparation that would need to be done to make this a useable wing, but this is all part of the learning process. At this point we have pretty much decided that the fuselage of the aircraft, which must be hollow, will be made out of carbon fiber, while the wings will consist of fiberglass on a low-density foam, possibly with a carbon fiber spar to save weight and add strength. The carbon fiber wing prototype is pictured below: I've been doing a lot of literature research on duct design, as well as aerodynamic design of the airplane. I'm getting to be fairly comptent in Fluent, thanks largely to Prof. Luo's course in Intermediate Fluid Mechanics, which is largely a CFD project course. Prof. Luo has been very helpful, and, speaking with him this evening at a reception, he is very anxious to help me make the use of my CFD knowledge. For the final project in his class I will be analyzing various parts of the aircraft in fluent, especially various duct designs and placement options. Below is a picture from a recent project he assigned to the class in Fluent.  In short, everyone is working hard and getting done what needs to be done. The due date for the PDR (end of november) is looming over all of our heads and I think everyone is responding very favorably to the project and our challenging timeline. Our short-term goal is to design and build a flyable (possibly propeller-driven) prototype airplane by late november, so as to educate ourselves to all aspects of airplane design. With any luck this craft may also serve as a flight computer testing platform. Stay tuned! |
| Saturday, October 25 | Will Runge |
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We've just completed and submitted our USLI Proposal for the 2008-2009 competition year. It actually was several weeks belated. As it turns out, Julie Clift and Al Krause, the NASA contacts for the competition, had been emailing all of the schedule information to Thomas Folk and AJ Gould, both of whom graduated Vanderbilt last year, and neither of whom still have active Vanderbilt email accounts. In any case, we got in touch with Julie Clift and she was willing to accept our Proposal as long as we got it in to her ASAP, so with Kyser leading up the effort we spent the last few days putting that together. The Vanderbilt USLI proposal for the 2008-2009 year can be viewed Here. I have uploaded the report to our website as well, and I think we're all very proud of it. In the past our reports for the competition have been one area where we have not scored particularly well, so this year we will be making a concerted effort to write really good reports. In other news, our Ducted Fan trainer, the Hobby Lobby Firebird Electrajet, has arrived. We will be assembling that this weekend and using it to familiarize ourselves, as engineers and as R/C pilots, as to the workings of ducted fans. The general plan still calls for the UAV to be powered by a Ducted Fan internal to the fuselage, and this basic ducted fan trainer will help familiarize us with the workings of these fast, high-performance aircraft. 
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| Friday, October 17 | Will Runge |
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Well, lots has been going on as of late. Unfortunately I have been unable to update the website until today, because ITS moved our data to a new server, and somewhere in the move something got mixed up and I lost access to our web directory. A few phone calls and emails, and then about a week of anxious waiting, and it looks like everything is working properly once more. I've been working with Thomas Carroll and Matt Heller in gaining a better understanding of the R-DAS and using it as a test stand for gathering, encapsulating, and transmitting the critical flight information from the aircraft to the ground. Though we hopefully will not end up using the R-DAS as our primary onboard flight computer on the airplane, it is still useful knowledge, and this way if something goes horribly wrong with our in-house flight computer, we will have the R-DAS as a standby unit which can do some of the same essential operations. Everything is now working with the R-Das; it is gathering 3-axis acceleration data, GPS location data, and barometric altitude data, encapsulating it, and transmitting it to the ground station via 900 mhz. The GPS receiver is 2.4 ghz, and once the unit gets a lock from 4 or more satellites, it can provide very accurate position, altitude, and, via differentiation, velocity data. Hopefully we are going to create an airspeed indicator as well, either by pressure transducers or thermocouples. Here is the unit as it stands now. By the end of next week it will be completely installed in the Corsair and used in flight. Actually in this picture I had not crimped the long ribbon cable to connect all the data boards, so two shorter cables are standing in for the single long cable.  Here is a picture of ThomaS Carroll in the lab, diligently working on installing the R-DAS hardware into our Corsair, taking care to maintain the center of gravity.  We've also recruited a new member, senior Mechanical Engineer Ben Havrilesko. Right now he is working with the composites team; Kyser, Bowden, and Tyler. The composites people have been working hard, shaping foam and learning more about fiberglass and carbon fiber. We are studying into which materials should be used where, as fiberglass is often lighter - though weaker - than carbon fiber, so we must make sure to make judicious use of both materials. Last night Tyler finished shaping a very nice 1/2 airfoil wing section (the wing is to be composed of two halves) out of foam, ready to be covered in Fiberglass as soon as the materials arrive.  We've also worked up a basic design for the UAV. As it stands now, the UAV is to be powered by a ducted fan internal to the fuselage, fed air by a NACA duct, perhaps with a Pitot hood. The UAV will have a clear acrylic camera dome in the front for the forward-facing camera, a 4" fuselage diameter, a ~4-foot wingspan, a clear camera bay just ahead of the wing for the high-resolution reconaissance camera or any other critical payload, and ample room under the wing for the onboard flight computer, which is to be arranged on trays sliding on vertical rails. We are going to be drawing this first prototype design in ProE over the next week or so, so keep an eye out for that. Finally, I've at last added a Wiki! It is powered by Google Sites, which is basically a Google software for Wiki-type websites. The wiki is to be a repository for all of our knowledge, easy enough to use that anyone can edit it, and hopefully useful to ourselves and to any future Vanderbilt Aerospace Club members as a reference and a guide to the essential knowledge gathered by our Labor. The link in the navigation on the left side of the page leads to the wiki, or you can find it Here. |
| Wednesday, October 1 | Will Runge |
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It's been a busy week in class but we've managed to get some exciting things done. First off, Thomas Bowden has been experimenting a lot with the marine foam that we may use for making die/cast for a custom carbon-fiber wing or fuselage shape. Using a 2-lb per cubic foot mixture, he cast a brick of the stuff and carved a rough airfoil-esque shape from it. When the carbon fiber sleeves arrive, he will attempt to make a carbon fiber airfoil shape over his wing. I spent much of Monday and Tuesday night working with the R-DAS and related electronics. I got the R-DAS working, and hooked up a switch to use as a trigger to make the R-DAS begin recording/transmitting data. I also got the GPS module working, which will provide altitude, velocity, acceleration, and of course position information which can be overlaid into Google Maps or over a static digital map of the launch area. I'm still having a little bit of difficulty with the R-DAS transmitter and receiver; it seems like we're missing a power cable for the receiver, but hopefully that'll be sorted out soon. My goal is to be able to fly the Corsair with instantaneous GPS and accelerometer data, in addition to a video signal, being transmitted to the ground station. On the topic of transmitting video signals, Robin Midgett, a technician who assists our club, gave us all a thorough education on the functioning and usage of antennas last week. As it turns out, the reason that the video signal from 2 weeks ago was so choppy was because we weren't using the antenna properly; this yagi antenna has to be aimed. Hopefully, knowing that, we will be able to record some excellent video the next time we take the plane up. On a final note, I recently was assigned a Fluent project where I had to analyze the air flow around a NACA 4412 airfoil at 50m/s freestream velocity. Here's a velocity profile screenshot from that assignment.  According to the professor who teaches that course, we should be able to import a pro-E model of our entire aircraft (or rocket for that matter), and use the software to determine the lift and drag characteristics of the craft at various angles of attack and airspeed. Surely that will be very useful information, so maybe next week I will work up a pro-e model of a generic aircraft shape, bring it into Fluent, and start experimenting with that. |
| Saturday, September 20 | Will Runge |
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Yesterday Tyler and I went out and flew the Corsair with the onboard camera functioning and sending instantaneous video signal to a 'ground station' laptop. The video signal was a little rough, but it's a start. It was pretty exhilirating to watch the inflight video when loops and rolls were being flown. We'll have to up the quality a good bit, though, for this to be useful for navigation and pilot orientation. There are a couple of issues with the Corsair. The very first time we ever landed the plane, on Thursday, the landing gear broke off. It tore chunks of styrofoam out of the wings, and I'm hesitant to reinstall the gear for fear it'll further damage the wings. Then, on the last landing of the day on Thursday, in what was only a slightly rough landing, the fuselage cracked. Then, yesterday, in, again, a slightly rough landing, the fuselage cracked right next to the old crack we repaired, the wing broke clean in half, and the tail wheel broke off. These were landings which would leave most other planes totally unphased. So we might be in search of a new aircraft sometime soon for testing our electronics. More on that later. The battle-damaged Corsair as it sits, with the camera installed. 
 We've been working a little bit with the R-DAS, getting it set up to transmit, soldering in a 'breakwire' trigger to activate it, and making a ribbon cable to carry data from the accelerometers to the R-DAS, and then from the R-DAS to the transmitter. I've got the receiver hooked up to the computer and am working through some of the quirks of making that work. Hopefully this time next week we'll be flying the Corsair and receiving in-flight video and orientation data instantaneously! I also added the new AIAA section, where we'll post information about what AIAA events we are attending, what topics we'll be presenting on, etc. I think the website is slowly reaching a satisfactory state where all I'll have to make is minor changes, and news updates here. |
| Thursday, September 18 | Will Runge |
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We recently took delivery of our ART-TECH WWII Corsair Replica plane. Purchased through Hobby Lobby, this 4-channel plane (our first off-the-shelf aileron-equipped airplane) will serve as the testbed for our electronics. We had our first few introductory flights of the airplane in its stock configuration, with me (Will Runge) at the controls. The plane is a beauty to fly, is extremely maneuverable, and seems powerful enough that it will be able to bear the burden of a couple of grams of extra electronics. I managed a couple of loops and rolls and some brief inverted flight, and was very impressed by the handling of this airplane. The steerable tail-wheel is an added bonus. The last landing was a little rough, but the plane is easily repaired and will continue to serve us loyally. Art-Tech Corsair  This afternoon we have loaded the airplane down with a tiny 8oz color video camera, and the 9v battery which powers it, and sometime this weekend we will attempt to pilot the airplane solely by video reference. If that goes well, we will hopefully be adding the tilt-pan servos to the camera (if necessary), so that an assistant, or co-pilot can aim the camera for the pilot so that the pilot doesn't have to turn the airplane just to see what is to his left/right or up/down. The next step after that will be to add our R-DAS, which serves as an analog-to-digital converter for the raw voltages from a 3-axis accelerometer. Once we get it woring properly. the R-DAS will transmit the 3-axis acceleration data to a ground computer (the same ground computer which displays the video feed from the airplane), and eventually, software on this ground computer will convert the 3-axis data to a simple display of the orientation of the aircraft. The conbination of a live-action, forward-facing video camera with instantaneous 3-axis acceleration data will hopefully provide enough information to allow a competent pilot to keep the airplane aloft without ever actually seeing the plane visually! Things are starting to get very exciting indeed! |
| Thursday, September 11 | Will Runge |
| Today Russ Bruner attended our weekly meeting and was able to show off the 3-axis accelerometer-based autopilot he is developing. Right now the device serves as a "panic switch" which he activates if he loses control of the airplane. Based on the data from the 3-axis accelerometer, an on-board computer which he developed himself determines the control correction necessary to level the wings and maintain or gain altitude, and affects the control surfaces accordingly. The plane is not yet ready to fly, but he gave us an impressive static demonstration where he inverted the plane, turned it on its side, etc, and then activated the autopilot. The control surfaces responded quickly and accurately to the stimulus. He hopes to have the plane ready to fly within the next few weeks. |
| Sunday, September 7 | Will Runge |
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Yesterday, Thomas Carroll, Thomas Bowden, and I (Will Runge) attended a Music City Missile Club launch. We met with Rodney McMillan, Russ Bruner, and several other members of MC^2, and learned a whole lot about some new kit manufacturers, various rocket components that may be of use to us, and made some new friends in the rocketry world. I also updated the Links section of our website, adding a bunch of new links under the Rocketry header, including some of the manufacturers and distributors that Rodney and Russ told us about. Finally, Russ Bruner told us more about the autopilot he is developing based on a 3-axis accelerometer. It sounds in-line with what we're going to need to deploy our UAV without having visual contact with the plane itself, and so sometime soon we're going to invite Russ to come over to Vanderbilt and show us what he's done and hopefully jump-start the UAV-electronics portion of this development project. |
| Friday, September 5 | Will Runge |
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We did some recruiting and interviewing over the last few weeks, and can now welcome the following new members to our organization: Thomas Bowden, Thomas Carroll, and Tyler Lamb. We've also brought in a Mechanical Engineering freshman, Zachary Smith, who we will mentor in the ways of rocketry and aviation so that when we (all seniors) graduate, the club can continue to grow. I finally got our license of WinFoil, and have been fooling around in that design software a little bit. It seems promising. Perhaps more promising, in my Intermediate Fluid Mechanics class, we're learning to use a program called Fluent, which may be useful for a more comprehensive analysis of the body of the aircraft we design. Some of our new members already have some great ideas for the UAV and for the rocket, and so it looks already like this is going to be a very exciting year for the Vanderbilt Aerospace Club. |
| Thursday, July 3 | Will Runge |
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I have been in contact with Malcolm Hardy, the creater of a piece of design software called WinFoil. Winfoil is a simplified analytical/design software intended for hobby airplane builders. The software is useful for selecting and designing airfoils and other body shapes, as well as calculating lift, drag, required power, etc. I think that it will be a very helpful tool for the UAV design group in the coming year. He is planning on writing a tutorial for us which will help guide a novice with no previous experience all the way from start to finish in the use of his software for designing an r/c airplane. The new computer is set up downstairs, we're just waiting for an ethernet jack to connect it to the network. The monitor is huge, maybe 28", and the computer is state-of-the-art, and should be of great use to us. I've been doing a little reading up on TWiki, and I think I should be able to operate the wiki software without too much trouble, as soon as I have the apache webserver set up. On another front, I'm still working on the Media section, having a little bit of trouble with the videos. I've got all of the videos uploaded, I believe, but one or two of them were misnamed, and for some reason, FireFox is trying to open the videos as text files, rather than with Windows Media Player (all the videos are .wmv format). And, somehow, Internet Explorer is able to display the videos just fine.... I've also completed the Links section. It has lots of handy references. |
| Wednesday, July 2 | Will Runge |
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I've been working on the Media section. The image gallery is now basically complete. Special thanks to Russ Brouner, who took all of the pictures we have from the competition launch in Huntsville, Alabama. The rest of the pictures are from our test launch last semester, and there are also various pictures taken in the lab and during deployment and flight tests on campus through the year. I completed the Contact section, and the Team section is also now complete for the existing members. I have completed the Proposal, PDR, CDR, FRR sections. These reports have not yet been written for the current year, but I uploaded last year's report for future reference, and made space for the coming year's reports. I also created the new section, Final Report, which I'd left out originally when I made the navigation panel. That page was also created, and last year's final report was made available. |
| Tuesday, July 1 | Will Runge |
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I have finalized the layout of the webpage. I may replace the top image, but other than that the basic layout of all of the pages of this site will remain mostly as you see them today. I am also now able to use Server Side Includes in order to simplify and streamline the coding of the website; each page you see is one page of content, with an 'include' for the top and left portions of the website, and an 'include' for the bottom portion of the website. The new club computer is being set up downstairs, and when the computer is set up and online, I will install an apache webserver on the computer. For the Wiki which I plan for the club to complete, we are using a php and perl software called TWiki. In order to have sufficient control over the wiki, we need to have ready access to the file configurations of the FTP directories which contain the software, and this is best done on a computer over which we have complete control. I have now added all the pictures that we've ever taken to the Media section. Tomorrow I'll add the videos, as long as the Vanderbilt FTP server doesn't prevent me from uploading them. |
| Monday, June 23 | Will Runge |
| The first draft of this proposed website design has been approved by our faculty advisor, so I am continuing with the development of this website. It is now time to start developing the content sections. I want to have the club create a Wiki to document all of our knowledge, so that our current wealth of knowledge is not lost when the current class of seniors graduates and the project is passed on to the next class. My inspiration comes from the NCSU Aerial Robotics club wiki, which thoroughly documents much of the knowledge that they have acquired over the years, and is continuously updated and improved by the successive classes and design groups. The NCSU Aerial Robotics club wiki can be viewed at http://art1.mae.ncsu.edu/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome. |
| Friday, June 20 | Will Runge |
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I'm still working on this new site design. - Reworked some of the colors - Redid the top image - Adjusted the news system |
| Thursday, June 19 | Will Runge |
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Today, I created the first template version of this website. I created the previous version, but it was too graphics-intensive and the colors were too elementary. This new version of the website will load faster, because it doesn't rely so heavily on images. Also, all critical documents are accessible from any given page on the website, and the navigation isn't so streamlined that things can be hidden in sub-categories.
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