Collaborate Disseminate
Multiple motors or servos are the norm for drones to achieve controllable flight, but a team from MARS LAB HKU was able to a 360° lidar scanning drone with full …read more Continue reading Single Rotor Drone Spins For 360 Lidar Scanning
It’s one thing to speculate about what’s happening with the Mars helicopter Ingenuity, but it’s another to get an insider’s view on recent flight problems. As we previously reported, Ingenuity …read more Continue reading Hackaday Links: October 3, 2021
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recap a week of hacks. A telescope mirror that can change shape and a helicopter without a swashplate lead the charge for fascinating engineering. These are closely followed by a vibratory wind generator that has no blades to spin. The Open Source Hardware …read more
They say that drummers make the best helicopter pilots, because to master the controls of rotary-wing aircraft, you really need to be able to do something different with each limb and still have all the motions coordinate with each other. The control complexity is due to the mechanical complexity of …read more
Continue reading Building and Flying a Helicopter With a Virtual Swashplate
While quadcopters seem to attract all the attention of the moment, spare some love for the rotary-wing aircraft that started it all: the helicopter. Quads may abstract away most of the aerodynamic problems faced by other rotorcraft systems through using software, but the helicopter has to solve those problems mechanically. And they are non-trivial problems, since the pitch of the rotors blades has to be controlled while the whole rotor disk is tilted relative to its axis.
The device that makes this possible is the swashplate, and its engineering is not for the faint of heart. And yet [MonkeyMonkeey] chose …read more
Continue reading Casting Tour-De-Force Results In Swashplate For Scale Helicopter