helicopter

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Hackaday Links: July 9, 2023

July 9, 2023 by 8 Comments

Good news this week from Mars, where Ingenuity finally managed to check in with its controllers after a long silence. The plucky helicopter went silent just after nailing the landing on its 52nd flight back on April 26, and hasn’t been heard from since. Mission planners speculated that Ingenuity, which needs to link to the Perseverance rover to transmit its data, landed in a place where terrain features were blocking line-of-sight between the two. So they weren’t overly concerned about the blackout, but still, one likes to keep in touch with such an irreplaceable asset. The silence was broken last week when Perseverance finally made it to higher ground, allowing the helicopter to link up and dump the data from the last flight. The goal going forward is to keep Ingenuity moving ahead of the rover, acting as a scout for interesting places to explore, which makes it possible that we’ll see more comms blackouts. Ingenuity may be more than ten-fold over the number of flights that were planned, but that doesn’t mean it’s ready for retirement quite yet.

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Patent Spat Leaves DJI Owing Textron $279M

May 1, 2023 by 46 Comments

Patents are the murky waters where technical jargon and legalese meet, and in this vast grey area of interpretation, DJI now owes Textron $279M.

At issue in the case were two patents issued to Textron (#8,014,909 and #9,162,752) regarding aircraft control systems for relative positioning to other vehicles and automatic hovering. The jury found that Textron’s intellectual property (IP) had been infringed and that damages amounted to $279M. DJI asserts that Textron’s patents are not valid and will appeal the decision. Appeals in patent trials are handled by the Federal Circuit and can be kicked up to the US Supreme Court, so don’t expect a final decision in the case anytime soon.

We’re not lawyers, so we won’t comment on the merits of the case, but, while it was a jury trial, it was one of many cases decided in the court of Judge Alan Albright, who has been the focus of scrutiny despite efforts to assign fewer cases to his docket amid wider efforts to stymie venue shopping in patent cases. Despite these efforts, the Western District of Texas is such a popular venue for patent cases that Berkeley offers a CEU on going to trial in Waco.

If you’re curious about more IP shenanigans, checkout the Honda mass takedown, the legality of making something similar, or why E3D patents some of their work.

German Air Force Surplus Teardown

February 23, 2023 by 11 Comments

It isn’t clear to us how [mrsylvain59] came into possession of a late-model piece of military gear from the German airforce, but we enjoyed watching the teardown below anyway. According to the documentation, the thing has a huge price tag, although we all know that the military usually pays top dollar for various reasons, so we are guessing the cost of the parts is quite a bit less than the price tag.

We don’t think [mrsylvain59] was sure what the amplifier (verstärker is German for amplifier) does. However, we recognized it as an avionics box from a UH-1 helicopter. We aren’t sure of its exact function, but it is classified under “Automatic Pilot Mechanisms and Airborne Gyro Components.”

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The Flight Of The Dremel

January 5, 2023 by 12 Comments

A few months ago we featured a model aircraft whose power plant came courtesy of an angle grinder. It was the work of [Peter Sripol], and it seems he was beseiged by suggestions afterwards that he might follow it up with a helicopter built using a Dremel rotary tool. Which he duly did, and the results can be seen in the video below the break.

The Dremel itself requires a gearing to drive the balsa-bladed rotor, and a tail rotor is mounted with its own motor at the end of a boom. The video has many entertaining failures which see him arrive at a set of balancing arms and a tailplane for stability. The result is a helicopter that flies after a fashion, and is even able to stay aloft for a few seconds rather than crashing to earth.

The machine lacks the full rotor pitch control of its commercial bretheren, indeed the only control is directional via the tail rotor. Still it deserves top marks for entertainment alone, and we wouldn’t mind a go ourselves. The original angle grinder craft can be seen here.

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Hackaday Links: October 9, 2022

October 9, 2022 by 16 Comments

Don’t you just hate it when you walk out of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck to your shoe? That’s a little bit like what happened when the Mars helicopter Ingenuity picked up a strange bit of debris on one of its landing pads. The foreign object was spotted on the helicopter’s down-pointing navigation camera, and looks for all the world like a streamer of toilet paper flopping around in the rotor wash. The copter eventually shed the debris, which wafted down to the Martian surface with no further incident, and without any apparent damage to the aircraft. NASA hasn’t said more about what the debris isn’t — aliens — than what it is, which of course is hard to say at this point. We’re going to go out on a limb and say it’s probably something we brought there, likely a scrap of plastic waste lost during the descent and landing phase of the mission. Or, you know, it’s getting to be close to Halloween, a time when the landscape gets magically festooned with toilet paper overnight. You never know.

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[Tom Stanton] Builds An Osprey

October 8, 2022 by 20 Comments

The V-22 Osprey is an aircraft like no other. The tiltrotor multirole military aircraft makes an impression wherever it goes; coincidentally, a flight of two of these beasts flew directly overhead yesterday and made a noise unlike anything we’ve ever heard before. It’s a complex aircraft that pushes the engineering envelope, so naturally [Tom Stanton] decided to build a flight-control accurate RC model of the Osprey for himself.

Sharp-eyed readers will no doubt note that [Tom] built an Osprey-like VTOL model recently to explore the basics of tiltrotor design. But his goal with this build is to go beyond the basics by replicating some of the control complexity of a full-scale Osprey, without breaking the bank. Instead of building or buying real swash plates to control the collective and cyclic pitch of the rotors, [Tom] used his “virtual swashplate” technique, which uses angled hinges and rapid changes in the angular momentum of the motors to achieve blade pitch control. The interesting part is that the same mechanism worked after adding a third blade to each rotor, to mimic the Osprey’s blades — we’d have thought this would throw the whole thing off balance. True, there were some resonance issues with the airframe, but [Tom] was able to overcome them and achieve something close to stable flight.

The video below is only the first part of his build series, but we suspect contains most of the interesting engineering bits. Still, we’re looking forward to seeing how the control mechanism evolves as the design process continues.

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Large Tip Driven Copter Turns Very Slowly

August 8, 2022 by 21 Comments

Picking propeller size for any aircraft, but especially VTOLs, it’s a tradeoff between size and RPM. You can either move a large volume of air slowly or a small volume of air quickly. Small and fast tend to be the most practical for many applications, but if you’re thinking outside the box like [amazingdiyprojects], you can build a massive propeller and make it fly at just one revolution per second. (Video, embedded below the break.)

One of the challenges of large propellers is their high torque requirements. To get around this, [amazingdiyprojects] drives the 5m diameter propeller from the tips using electric motors with propellers. The blades are simple welded aluminum frames covered with heat-shrunk packing tape, braced with wires for stiffness.

The flight controller, with its own battery, is prevented from spinning with the blades by counteracting the spin of a small DC motor. Each blade is equipped with a servo-driven control surface, which can give roll and pitch control by adjusting deflection based on the blade’s radial position.

[amazingdiyprojects] control setup is very creative but somewhat imprecise. Instead of trying to write a custom control scheme, he configured the old KK2.15HC flight controller for a hexacopter. Each control servo’s PWM signal routes through a commutator disc with six sectors, one for each motor of the virtual hexacopter. This means each of the servos switches between six different PWM channels throughout its rotation. To compensate for lag when switching between channels, [amazingdiyprojects] had to tune the offset of the commutator disc otherwise it would veer off in the wrong direction. After a second test flight session to tune the flight controller settings, control authority improved, although it is still very docile in terms of response.

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