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Monday, June 28, 2010

UAV: Update 1

We've made big plans again! This time we're going to be working on building a UAV (Unmanned Air Vehicle) over the summer, desgined to drop water balloons on pre-programmed GPS coordinates. So far, we have ordered several servos, the Arduino Duemilanove board, brushless motors, and lots of different propellers. We're pouring the meager profits we made from ads in our Elements app into buying these parts, though we're still in the red unfortunately!

We are currently in the design stage. We have so far decided to use a balsa frame with cellophane covering (we'll see how that goes and maybe try something else). We're going to order the balsa pieces precut, which means we had to design the entire plane first. To achieve this end, we are using SketchUp 7. Here is one of our beautiful preliminary designs:

As you can see, the nose still needs to be designed. In addition, we need to finish modelling the ailerons and put them into this file. We will continue to document our progress, with as many videos and pictures as possible, and maybe at the end we can write up a tutorial for how we did it (assuming we actually succeed!)