A shameful screwup

It has been exactly two months since I made the last post. I know I've been quite lazy, but the last days in school was pretty though and when the summer started I had to relax a little. Currently I am doing summer work so I wont have much spare time but I hope that I can do at least something on my plane.

Anyway, last saturday I was out and flew little with my Calimero elektro and it flied well. I also tried to get my plane, in which I am going to install my APM, manually. It didn't went very well, I did totally screw up of which I'm ashamed. When I installed the motor just to see how it was looking mounted, I just used 1 of 4 screws. I forgot to check that before I went to the field, it ended with a minor crash the moment after take off. I was wondering why the plane turned right after it left the ground, but when I inspected the plane, the reason was clear. The only damages to the plane was fortunately just that the tree around the only screw had cracked, otherwise everything was looking nice. I can probably fix it in a couple of minutes.

Bellow is some pictures, the first is showing the motor and the second one is me starting the Calimero.
(O well i couldn't find the camera, well I'll post the pictures later)

Season premiere

Yesterday I was out and premiered my calimero elektro sailplane. It flew well and I was glad to get it into the air again. I was worried a bit, because it is recently repaired and I was not sure whether it flew straight or not, but it did not crash so I am fully satisfied.

Anyway the plane which is supposed to be an UAV wasn't fully complete, I could have flown it but I didn't want to take any risk. I need to hook up the batteries in parallel, so I will need such an connector. There are also some minor preparations that will be need to be done.

Motor installed!

Finally my rc-equipment is installed. Hopefully I can do the maiden flight this saturday and maybe also my calimero-electro will do the season premiere then. The weather forecast looks good, just hope that i can get a ride to the field then.

It is alive!

Yesterday I soldered all the pin headers and tried to run the APM software, but it was not working correctly. The compiler complained about some missing class constructor. It took a while to find out that the APM 1.02 didn't seem to support the Atmega 2560 chip, so I had to run the APM 2.012, which is an unstable version but it seems to work fine.

Anyway, it is running and I have got some nice test data. Below is a video that shows the roll, pitch and heading of the board.

Second arrival

Yesterday my setup for the plane arrived. I have ordered some Tipple 3s 1800mah batteries, an iCharger, two 11/4.7 propellers and a E-max BL2810/12 motor. Hopefully i can get my plane into the air this week. Once the parts are installed, which shouldn't take too long time, I just have to get to the field.

The arrival!

Hooray!

Finally, my ArduPilot Mega has arrived. It is going control my aircraft when autopilot mode is enabled. I have ordered it from the diydrones store. If there is time, I hope that I can get some test data tomorrow, but first I need to solder all the pin headers.

The setup consists of a 3-axis accelerometer, a 3-axis gyro, a GPS and a pressure meter. It is nice that the whole project is based on arduino, which is an open source project. I have already had a good impression of arduino. I have been experimenting some with an arduino uno.

Below is there a picture on my kit. The red board is the main shield with 16MHz Atmega1280, the blue board is the IMU shield with all the sensors and the small blue board is the GPS unit.

The plane I have chosen to make into a drone is my brother's old 0.20 model, which never got airborne. It was just laying there on the loft as shown in the picture at the bottom. I can not really remember the name of the plane, but I will check it up later. Hopefully, my motor and batteries will come tomorrow. It would be good if I can test the plane as soon as possible to see if it is flyable.