Friday 25 April 2014

Its the last week of our 4 weeks of Easter break! This is Edwin giving an update of past week's progress:

The latest news on the carbon fibre plates for our quadcopter mainframe is that delivery will be delayed for yet another week (WHAT!? *&#%@$*!!!). But its ok. Good stuff are worth waiting for.

Angus and I were instructed to build a simple protective structure for our Quadcopter. I proposed to use PVC pipes (those that they use for water plumbing) instead of carbon rods because their fittings are readily available. This cage took me slightly more than 1 hour to build, and it is HUGE! (see figure below)


It measures 1.25 metres in width. Thankfully the pipe's OD fits the carbon fibre tube's ID (18 mm), so installation and fitting is easy. The only disadvantage is its heavy weight. I'm planning to drill a lot of holes on the pipes to reduce its weight. It is meant to reduce impact during crash (to protect propeller/motor and external objects), thus as long as its rigid enough to hold its shape, the number holes on the pipes should not matter. The cage is built elevated to the same level as the propeller (see Figure below).


Still on the subject of cage, Bing Zhi has been making progress with his prototype fabrication. Due to budget constraints, he is planning to downsize and use 12 mm diameter carbon (longitudinal direction) rods to build his prototype. It should take at least another week for him get the raw materials and build it before we get to see the real physical cage. The figures below shows his customised part (3-D printed). It will be used to connect the big cage onto carbon fibre tubes that are attached onto the Quadcopter's centre frame.








Another cage we've been experimenting and testing is Leonard's terrestrial drive cage. He has been trying to assemble everything together for the past 2-3 weeks (God knows how much time he spent 3-D printing the modular parts). Land movement wise, it was quite successful. JD managed to control and get it moving easily (see picture below). Angus was so excited he wanted to try flying it straight away. However, there were some difficulty in flying due to the lack of rigidity in the printed parts.



Nevertheless, we can say it achieved the primary objective of  rolling on the ground with the small Quadcopter. Here is another picture of the cage (slightly reinforced with styrofoam).

(Yeah it was dark; this picture was taken quite late. You can see how hardworking our guys were!)

Jeremy has been working on programming for his battery loader. The electronics stuff have been bought. All he needs to do now is to fix everything together and make it to work! (see figure below).




We all have 3 reports to be submitted in the coming week and everyone is working extra/double/triple/very hard for officially the last month of our University student life. It has been a long (and sometimes agonising) wait to see our final product. But i strongly urge everyone to stay tuned and be patient. Like what I've mentioned, good stuff are worth waiting for! We will make our Quadcopter fly with everything else working!

Sunday 20 April 2014

Progress update!

Hi Happy Easter everyone!

Anyway JD here updating the blog again, well I've got a lot to update you guys about our progress these past 2 weeks!

Basically we've got our finally long awaited batteries!









 The monstrous battery for our quad copter, and that means, Angus and me can test out our motors and propellers and see how fast it can go!









As seen above the powerful battery powering up our motor and propeller. If you were there you can feel the vibrations and thrust that it created, it's quite scary that's why we also included a test cage to test it out.

And another thing is that for me the control system designer, I've been testing out the flight for the small quad copter to test out the functions of the Futaba controller as well as the Arduino Pilot Mega 2.6 with mission planner, you can see the videos below showing me testing the landing function of the Quad and also the Loiter mode, where it locked the GPS position and it refuses to move when its being dragged out.

*edit the loiter video I cant seem to upload it but here's the link =) Loiter



And for the the terrestrial drive by leonard here's a sneak preview on our small quadcopter (with jurassic park theme in the background)!


And for the structure of our quadcopter we have a few small additional stuffs for protecting the motor, our distribution board and etc.
The 3D printer building the motor protection cage

the motor protection cage


Cable holders

Distribution board holder

Another distribution board holder

And here's a quick sneak peak on how powerful our motor without the propeller, being tested out after I finally configure the ESC with the APM, which took me a few days to troubleshoot! (that's explain the evil laughter... sorry too excited...)


Last but not least here's Jeremy with his battery loader concept taking shape!!
Let's see in a few weeks time everything will be integrated into one system and we will be able to show off each and everyone's effort to fly the quadcopter successfully!


Anyway cheers guys! Hope you guys have an awesome long weekend! Stay tuned for our next update and hopefully we will assemble the big quad and you can see it fly!!!

Signing of JD =D





Tuesday 8 April 2014

Hello all!

This post is an short update on what we did.

We had a career fair where there was an opportunity to display the project.



The posters are samples of some of the group members' posters (Bing Zhi & Jeremy)
If you would like to see the rest do leave a comment.

Many people took an interest in the project. It was a good opportunity to give out resumes as well as explain to potential employers on the scope of the project.

We hope you enjoyed this short update.

Have a good day!