On Sun, 2010-03-28 at 09:58 -0500, Curtis Olson wrote: > Hi, > > > I could use a little help from one of our aerodynamics experts. > > > First a little background. DIYdrones.com is a group of hobbiests with > an interest in building hobby / open-source uav's. Actual projects > vary widely, but often they are based on small electric powered foam > gliders (like an "easy star".) For most people hardware costs are in > the couple hundred dollar range. One of the interesting things about > DIYdrones.com is that it was started by Chris Anderson who is an > editor at Wired magazine. Part of his effort is an experiment into > open-source "hardware" as well as open-source software. (And for > hardware, it's the "design" that's open-source and free to copy and > modify, it still costs money to build a physical widget.) > > > A couple of weeks ago I did a podcast interview with Chris Anderson > and Tim Trueman on the subject of using FlightGear for hardware in the > loop testing. This is an area that many hobby level uav-ers haven't > considered. If you are *really* bored you can dig around the > diydrones.com site and probably find a link to my interview ... it's > about 30-45 minutes and was done very late on a Sunday evening, so > there are a couple times where the little electrons in my brain ran up > against a sleeping brain cell ... I wasn't on my A game, let me just > say it that way. :-) > > > DIYdrones.com sponsors a periodic "for fun" contest and this time > around they are thinking about doing something FlightGear based. The > DIY drones contests are setup so that individuals can compete on their > own and submit their results to the contest coordinator. It's based > on the "honor" system, and avoids requiring people from around the > world to travel to a central contest location. There is a thread > here: > > > http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/proposed-next-t3-round > > > If you scroll down a bit, you can see that someone found an AC3D model > of an easystar glider (this is a relatively cheap and small and light > and slow flying RC hobby airplane.) What I am hoping is that someone > here could help put together an initial flight dynamics model > configuration for the easy star. I don't have any specs, but if we > have someone willing to help out, I'm sure we could get answers to > questions from the diydrones community. > > > The goal here would be to put together a "reference" easystar aircraft > package (3d and flight dynamics models) that could be used as the > basis for the DIY drones contest. > > > Do we have anyone willing to help get an aircraft package together? > > > (I have no idea what the licensing on the easystar ac3d model is, but > worst case scenario if it isn't GPL compatible we can distribute the > aircraft package separately for the diydrones contest or perhaps one > of our 3d modelers would want to create our own GPL compatible easy > star.) > > > Thanks! > > > Curt.
Readme in the model zip says "This Model was created for FMS and now modified by Ken Northup using AC3D and is freely distributed. Please feel free to modify as you wish using AC3D." I've started an aeromatic-ish FDM for this aircraft and tweaked the ac3d model. For some reason I had to scale it down 76.4%. Not sure what the original model units were... The model also contained a lot of cruft from some other flightsim proggy. First design decision I faced: There are no ailerons on the stock version of this model, so I decided to use the aileron control to drive the rudder so it can be flown from the joystick. Thoughts? More to follow, Ron ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
