Boohoohoo

I learned of some unfortunate news yesterday with respect to the NCSU Aerial Robotics Club. Our pride and joy, the '12footer' crashed on Sunday. Check out the AR website for a video link and some explanation. Here are some still photos taken by the helpless pilot, Alan, at the crash site. It wasn't Alan's fault by any means, most signs point to a servo battery failure; it must have been a heart wrenching feeling to see it go down without any control.

This first image is created from the autopilot datalog and screenshot, which was then fed into Google Earth. The RC runway is in the fore ground. The 12footer went down about 1/3 of a mile away from the flight pad. The colored dots are the autopilot way-points.

Here you can see to bulk of our autonomous system: the engine and autopilot are on the left side; (no-so) safety switch, GPS antenna, computer antenna, and autopilot wireless card are in the center of the picture.

Most of the 12 footer came through the tall pines, some of it remained with the trees.

This is one of the wings, they got obliterated along with everything else.

Sigh


We are already underway with the mobilization of our backup system. Stay tuned to the AR website for updates on the Wide-body 8footer.

O

Due to he unfavorable winds which canceled a scheduled Aerial Robotics flight test, Tim and I were able to partake in our first adventure race on Saturday. The event consisted of riding our bikes around Raleigh, Cary, Umstead S.P., and Crabtree County Park to find a series of clue based check points. Time had trouble with cramping which cut our race a little short, but it was still fun to go ride 35 miles with an objective. This was my first taste of hopefully many more Bike Orienteering events to come. After the ride back to school Time and I had finished 45 miles on our bikes for the afternoon.

Beginning of the Storm

Today started out just like any other day, bike to the AR lab, find something to do before class, and the goto Broughton 2211. But the day certainly didn't end up in a normal fashion. Since the semester is wrapping up I didn't have to go to PE(Ultimate), so I spent my time getting the last bits of information for my Stability and Controls class project.

After an hour or so I headed back to my room to masticate (chicken spaghetti) and finalize my portion of the project. That was done in due time so that I could head over to Centennial Campus for my Structures project testing (pictures to follow). The test went well overall. Matt and I missed the stiffness by alot, missed the estimated weight by a factor of 2, and our strength to weight was off by a factor of 1/2. The ultimate load was probably the closest of any groups, we held 90lbs. with an estimate of 100lbs. The waiting portion of the testing was not fun, one group ahead of us took more than an hour to 'break' their structure, really it just oozed apart at the glue joints...shotty construction. Ours on the other hand deformed over 1.25" and when it failed you knew it. For me, I heard the pop and then the whiz of a quarter and peice of scrap aluminum fly by my head. For anybody interested in our material of choice Matt and I used Rohacell foam with Marinepoxy as the bonding agent.

After than was over I had to 'help' Matt finish his portion of he Stab. & Control project...don't ask.

I dropped off the project in Broughton and then headed back to my place to get ready for some pick-up Ultimate! I had a good time playing, it had been nearly 2 years since I had played any good pick up and it was nice to be in the swing of things.

With all of my running around today I think I set a record for number of time in and out of my room at 5. Usually I can plan better than that, but today was fairly chaotic day.





























Notice how circular holes turn into ovals and the displacement gage is embedded in the structure after failure.

A new era

I have decided to go ahead and capture a blogger site name. This is to give me a personal space to share what I feel, with whoever. You can check out some of the cool things I've done with Team RAF on what has reverted back to SOS's blog; check out dates from October 2006 to March 2007.