FirmamentFX
09-24-2006, 02:20 PM
Hi everyone,
I'm new to this forum, so I thought I'd say hello, and give a brief(!) description of a project I have just started working on.
A bit of background about me - I am a musician (theatrical musical director) who has a massive interest in building and flying RC aircraft for many years. My degree is in Electronic Engineering, which will hopefully give me a good grounding for this project. I am also a light aircraft private pilot (Katana and Cessna).
This is, to be honest, less an RC aircraft project and more a proof-of-concept systems design - although the system design will be based around RC. I have had the joy of flying large aircraft and now want to move on and do something a bit more adventurous.
I plan to design and build a large (1/7.5) scale F/A-22 fighter, with sophisticated flight control systems, and (eventually) a form of autopilot and mission control, with several modes (waypoint navigation using GPS, auto take off, and in the future a basic custom ILS assisted landing system). The control system will be a laptop PC with a Thrustmaster Cougar joystick and throttle, connected by a custom serial interface to an RC transmitter. Within the aircraft, 2 Hitec Fusion 9 receivers will take the commands from the ground, and along with information fed from sensors and other equipment onboard the aircraft will be fed into an onboard processing unit (programmed in ADA) which will then control all aspects of the aircraft and flight. The programming will be done on an open-architecture basis, meaning that it can be adapted for other aircraft too, and is future-proof.
The other thing we want to implement is a 2-way data link with the aircraft, allowing flight data and possibly even a camera feed to be transmitted back to the ground so that the computer screen can show a "glass cockpit" display and a live video feed from "in cockpit" or wherever.
Asa far as safety features go, the main ones will be a "Return to Base" feature, which will work on a GPS system, so if the aircraft goes out of range, or the PC goes down, or the radio link is lost, the aircraft will return to a given GPS co-ordinate and circle. We will also have an "eject" feature on a separate radio frequency - which puts the aircraft into a preset configuration, cuts the engines, and when the aircraft has slowed sufficiently deploys a large chute in the nose to bring it back to earth gently (the amount of time, effort, and money that will be spent on this, we need some kind of failsafe :D ).
This started as a bet (not for money, for beer :roll2: ) with a friend (you know how it is - in the pub, he says there's no way you could do this, etc etc... :D ), and has developed from there. Although it's going to take a looong time - hopefully it will be great fun to do, and we'll learn a lot about aircraft systems - both real and model!
Long post sorry! But I hope I've piqued people's interest in this project :-)
Best,
Martin
I'm new to this forum, so I thought I'd say hello, and give a brief(!) description of a project I have just started working on.
A bit of background about me - I am a musician (theatrical musical director) who has a massive interest in building and flying RC aircraft for many years. My degree is in Electronic Engineering, which will hopefully give me a good grounding for this project. I am also a light aircraft private pilot (Katana and Cessna).
This is, to be honest, less an RC aircraft project and more a proof-of-concept systems design - although the system design will be based around RC. I have had the joy of flying large aircraft and now want to move on and do something a bit more adventurous.
I plan to design and build a large (1/7.5) scale F/A-22 fighter, with sophisticated flight control systems, and (eventually) a form of autopilot and mission control, with several modes (waypoint navigation using GPS, auto take off, and in the future a basic custom ILS assisted landing system). The control system will be a laptop PC with a Thrustmaster Cougar joystick and throttle, connected by a custom serial interface to an RC transmitter. Within the aircraft, 2 Hitec Fusion 9 receivers will take the commands from the ground, and along with information fed from sensors and other equipment onboard the aircraft will be fed into an onboard processing unit (programmed in ADA) which will then control all aspects of the aircraft and flight. The programming will be done on an open-architecture basis, meaning that it can be adapted for other aircraft too, and is future-proof.
The other thing we want to implement is a 2-way data link with the aircraft, allowing flight data and possibly even a camera feed to be transmitted back to the ground so that the computer screen can show a "glass cockpit" display and a live video feed from "in cockpit" or wherever.
Asa far as safety features go, the main ones will be a "Return to Base" feature, which will work on a GPS system, so if the aircraft goes out of range, or the PC goes down, or the radio link is lost, the aircraft will return to a given GPS co-ordinate and circle. We will also have an "eject" feature on a separate radio frequency - which puts the aircraft into a preset configuration, cuts the engines, and when the aircraft has slowed sufficiently deploys a large chute in the nose to bring it back to earth gently (the amount of time, effort, and money that will be spent on this, we need some kind of failsafe :D ).
This started as a bet (not for money, for beer :roll2: ) with a friend (you know how it is - in the pub, he says there's no way you could do this, etc etc... :D ), and has developed from there. Although it's going to take a looong time - hopefully it will be great fun to do, and we'll learn a lot about aircraft systems - both real and model!
Long post sorry! But I hope I've piqued people's interest in this project :-)
Best,
Martin