First, I'd like to point out that when I predicted the gizmo 'trajectory' at the luncheon at Space Frontiers I was joking about the flip. I was serious about not getting the control code right, but I was joking about a flip.
We've worked out or worked around all the hardware bugs and got Gizmo moving around under power. Monday evening we spun up several motors but had serious power issues. We couldn't get enough watts to spin up the motors fast enough to fly. Tuesday during the day, Pierce picked up some more ring terminals, and I picked up a new 12V deep-cycle/marine battery. We attempted flight again Tuesday evening, and saw two problems, the power leads were still dropping too much power and the flight code isn't right. Throttling up results in the two motors in one axis going to full throttle and the other axis going to minimum throttle (off). We re-cabled with heavier gage wire and tried again. Having good power made a huge difference. One motor went to full power and flipped the whole bird faster than I could react. Next step is to manually run through the flight code with a pencil, paper, and calculator to make sure I'm not doing something really stupid with the math. The second thing is to make sure I didn't mix up input signals, like mixing up a pitch command and the throttle. Third thing is to scale the feedback loop constants way back. I'll also be picking up an intelligent charger so I can just recharge the batteries without constantly watching them, and another marine battery. Now that the hardware works correctly I'll be able to debug the code, play with different control algorithms, and work out better interfaces and such. Dave -- David Masten <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
