Process

Taiki Resnick and Thelonious Cooper

Coming up with good ideas is hard, realizeing those ideas is harder. At the beginning of the week we worried about the project. We saw two ways to do it:

1: we strap a bluetooth speaker to a helicopter. We thought doing this although it would technically work it would not be fun because there would be no challenge.

2: make an extreamly complicated drone which could hover and follow you around. we knew from my past experience doing somthing like this is extreamly difficult. I am glad we found a happy medium.

When the project really kicked into high gear we decided to split up some of the work based on what we were better at. Taiki was a much better modler than I was and I had more experience with electronics. Unfourtunetly most of time spent working on the electronics has gone to waste as there was simply not enough time to properly implement it.

We had to make some aggressive redesigns at the end of the week when we realized our current design was too heavy. We knew that the body was heavy but we thought that it would be able to lift it. Unfourtunetly these thoughts were based on false measerments. In our experiment to find out how much it could lift towards the begining of the sesion we accidentally found the static thrust of the helicoper we would later take apart, instead of the true lifting power.

Our experiment had us attach the helicopter to something much heavier than it could lift. We then put it on a scale with the object and set the scale to 0 we then put the helicopter on full throtle and saw how far the wheight on the scale whent below zero. Unfourtunetly instead of giving us the true lift of the helicopter it gave us the static thrust. The static trust is basicly the absolute maximum it can lift, but it can't acually lift that in reality. For example our static thrust was 12 oz but in reality the helicopter could only lift 9 oz.

Over the course of the project we had to make many drastic redisgns the larges of which had to have been almost completely getting rid of the cage, which was i near perfect sphere that whent around the helicopter and protected it. unfourtunetly the cage was too heavy so we had to scrap it. Another redesign we had to make was changing our our original vision of a flying sphear powered by a helicopter that would follow you around and play music. When we realized how difficult this would be we instead thought instead we would just have it hover around and play music. However we did not have time to implement the pid controller nessecary for hovering without being at the mercy of the wind.

A pid controller or proportional, integration, and differential controller in essence takes the input of where you want to go(or if you don't have an input choose where you want to go); Determines the nessecary angle for the helicopter to be at to get there the fastest; Then moves the motors to do that.

Although our project did not end up being what we envisioned in the begining of the session, we are very happy with how it turned out. Our project  was one of the only ones that acually flew in the end(at least until it ran out of battery).