As this blog still generates a small amount of traffic, I am posting this notice to acknowledge that all of the content in this blog is several years old and the project had now been abandoned.I don’t intend to resume progress on the project in the near or forseeavle future. I will leave the blog up for now as it may have referential value for people pursuing similar projects, even if the information is out of date.
Recently, I was able to take the Bixler to Irvinebank, and take some footage of the burnoff firefront. These images were pulled out with Blender, and stitched together with GIMP to make the panoramic image of the fire.
The landing after taking the shots was less than desirable, resulting in a cracked horizontal stabiliser. Trees surrounding a short strip made the the angle of descent greater, which resulted in a fast and hard landing. Hopefully I’ll be able to use FPV gear next to land and launch from a more appropriate location, and also get a live video feed for observers to watch.
Unfortunately, FPV gear that had recently arrived was faulty, having trouble maintaining a solid connection at any range. Next time…
Got the Uno to send back some live GPS data, this time displayed as a converted KML track. Took this live, but interference from both rc TX and the xBee made for a REALLY bad connection. Seriously had a better connection going through two houses. Shows that the maximum speed achieved was 92.2 km/h. Probably a result of connecting the gap between two disconnected routes, but seemed steady on the graph. The flats are averages calculated by Google Earth to fill in the gaps:
This is a voltage divider that will give me a max of 5v out of a 12.6v (max) input. Of course this is linear, and at the moment this will draw 3.8×10^-6. Hopefully that will be enough for the ADC to pick it up, which I am very skeptical about being very close to 0.
Arduav 