Posts Tagged ‘DIY’

Spyder Prototype #3

Monday, July 12th, 2010

I’ve started working on the flying thing again, and I almost have the flight software to the point where I’m happy with it.  It still needs a little tweaking, but in general it’s much more stable than it’s ever been, and it’s still very agile.

I ditched the Kalman filter and went back to basics, using simple integer math and a single 3-axis gyro.  It won’t auto-level itself, but it’ll stay where I put it remarkably well, and that’s all I really wanted.  Check out the video of my first crash:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjvJLm725h0

The slow march of progress

Monday, June 29th, 2009

I haven’t posted anything for a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t done anything.  I’ve been fairly busy, actually.  I built myself a computer controlled router and have started modeling the body of the flying thing I’m trying to build .

Learning to use the machine has been entertaining - there’s quite a lot to it, and a decent learning curve to the software and just producing something in general.  Having a machine to cut stuff doesn’t automatically give you the ability to make things.  It helps make them a little faster and more accurately, but you still have to work out how to build the things in the first place.

The reason for building the machine was so it could cut out parts while I’m going through the physical prototyping phase the Wolf Spyder.  Hopefully I’ll have more to post soon.