Smoking Ace Update

We are still alive. Just working on some other projects at the moment.

The Smoking Aces are still under construction. After flying the planes for hours on simulators and finally the real thing, we realized that you can't cheat physics. It makes for some interesting behaviors in short-coupled tail designs. What is kind of cool is that deeply-swept wings actually set the maximum angle of attack for the aircraft. We surmise that it is due to over-wing airflow. As the aircraft pitches, the airflow over the wing obscures the clean flow over the tail and finally completely blocks the flow.

Not so much block, but the distance between the tail and the wing is shorter than the mean turbulence. So the dirty air is not laminar enough to make a well-circulating flow around the tail. As the tail loses laminar flow and finally gets only turbulent flow it loses lift and finally stalls. This reduces the effectiveness of the tail and the plane rotates back to balance the tail input. This seems reasonable enough an explanation to the pitch wobbles, that are only partially-tamed by gyro input.

The first time we saw this behavior, it was exciting. Our pilot certainly thought so.

There is even a slight regression in our projects. Not so much as a negative thing, but more an artistic reawakening. I have to finish working up some drawings so we can discuss some design requirement changes. Building the Smoking Aces, we discovered that what we thought was a lot of space, was not. We also found out that 1000 in*lbs is a tough thing to take out in such a small space. Considering each wing applies this, we found some strange deflections in the air frame when the wings support large flight loads. These were certainly not unexpected, but we did not realize that our load paths were not as well controlled as we though.

Looking back through some old documentation, I found some of our original "Fat Man" designs. What we learned with the "Fat Man" was that fuselage depth or in its case root thickness was our friend. If you have healthy wing roots, there is a lot more space to manage payloads. More so, there is a trade off with larger thickness designs. The trade-off that is important is that often their curvatures do not change much.

When you build metallic structures, you see the need for structural caps. Without them, it is hard to fix skin to the structure without some heroic measures for the most part. Next time I will talk about some of the things that did not work for us.

Cool New Stuff At Our Zazzle Shop

Every drop helps the cause.

Thank you for your support.

Adam

make custom gifts at Zazzle

The Big Babies

We are about to go flying! I hope within the month we are airborne with ten pounds of dead weight. It is a big day. After several years, we are turning the corner. It was not easy, and I would like to thank my folks and friends for sticking with me. Inventorship is far from an easy process. Now it is time to give birth to revenue ;)

In order to continue a beloved American tradition, each of our factory Big Babies will have unique nose art. I have been drawing for months to get this many pictures together. I am sure if you know me and the project, you probably know each of them. So I will not spend much time explaining them, I hope that everyone likes them. I have shirts available on the cafe press site. I think that they really bring out the smile in me when I talk about the planes, or the women who inspired them.

Trip to the SPIE Defense Sensing Show

I went to the SPIE Defense Sensing Conference this week. It was a nicely arranged affair in the Marriot World Center in Orlando. They insisted that you park several miles away and use one of the shuttle buses to get to the conference, that worked out well. The buses were often enough that you were not forced to wait forever to go either way and they gave you granola bars and water for the trouble. Don't they know, engineers get bagels, factories get doughnuts? You can't make them think...

After perusing the technical book area, which was pretty well stocked with an array of SPIE documents and textbooks,, if you had the cash. I was pretty interested in their IR and Spectroscopy handbooks, but they were pricey. If anyone has a heart, I would gladly accept a torrent or a photocopy :)

We spoke with several vendors in the cavernous exhibition area. It was clear that in many ways we were just not up to the task of doing business there. I also noticed that people feeding out of the government trough were particularly mislead in the value of things. How can someone in good faith try to sell tank windows to a normal person? Especially when they cost $30k+ to start in bulk. We saw some neat optics stuff. To be honest, I was not even sure what you did with it. Even as slowly as we fly, a FLIR with 300 lines, 90deg range and 30Hz is going to be hard to use unless the goal is just to get an image.

All in all, a good trip. A little humility is a good thing.

Big Baby Developments... Daddy's Building a Brand New Plane

I am not ready to reveal the Big Baby just yet. It is going pretty well, symmetric and no smeared blood or anything. No blood this late in a project is a big relief.

The airframe for the next version will be a bit different. This time, I was careful to build the skin by wetting and pinning the skin to as closely as possible match the model curvature. Besides the 10s of pins that were used, the technique was pretty effective. 

Use masking tape along the down side of the board so that there is a basic joint between the pieces. Then just use a wet sponge to wet the downside of each of the planks. Lay the plank onto the surface of the model to be copied. Work from one end and pin along the edge every inch or so about a 1/10th of an inch from the edge each time. Do this for one inch rows along the plank. Depending on the curvature being copied you may need more pins or to pin in specific directions to keep the balsa layer in contact with the curve.

After the part has dried, overnight or after a few hours, adjust the pins to fit the planks as closely as possible to the curve. The planks may have to be rewetted to relax them into place. Then use a foam-safe (in my case) glue in the joints. The tape will be removed before you install internal structure. Once it is dried and the seams are glued. You will want to remove the pins and the part from the form. I cut simple cross-sections to support the structure. Then used CA glue to glue the seams and to bond the internal structure to the skin.

Driving Business to Your Website

This is one of the mor difficult aspects of internet marketing and small businesses. Many others can spend more resrouces to get the word out at any given time. I have tried to approach it from a step-wise perspective. First step was to get the basic website out, without content you have nothing. A buddy of mine said to make sure that you do not make sure that you do not cludder ideas or muddy your message trying to stuff too much on each page. There are plenty of ways to make the search engines pick up your content in systematic ways.

Next, gather up your all of your suppliers or products that you normally use and make a simple page that links out to their official pages, that way your name or website will be linked to theirs. This will not in and of itself make a huge contribution, but if they look up this junk sucks, it will bring up your name. ;) As they say, any advertising where they spell your name correctly, is good advertising.

I am not sure if this next step was the best, but I found some of the low cost tshirt and mouse pad sites and through a bunch of products out there. People in general would not associate technical ideas with a tshirt. However, it gives you a different lane of approach to your content. Make sure that you fill out the description sections of each item and try to make sure your main url shows up in as many places as possible. These link backs help your search engine scores and increase the possibility that someone will click through to your site. Traffic, even bounce traffic is good. You never know whose little brother will see a t-shirt with a logo and pass it onto their brother the director of your next customer's organization.

Another simple and seemingly the most effective plan of attack. Use your open source community. They are mindless minions of habit. Ok, that is a bit harsh. However, Sourceforge, CodePlex and similar sites have huge mostly anonymous traffic, if you can publish any of your source code as a project and link back to your website you will get the word out to a large audience of people
with similar interests. I have found that techies run in circles and that they are inexoribly drawn to cool projects even if they are not in their fields of expertise. Likewise, if you use a product that has a user community, by all means post. Try to be as active as possible and keep posting your url in your signature. That link back thing is the cheapest and simplest advertising you can achieve.

If you can manage it, you may also put up single page advertising sites with kind of universal message information on any of the better trafficked free hosting sites. Google, Microsoft and all of the 500 pound apes have free sites. Free is good, at this point you are trading time for initial expense. So put up your message pages and cross-link them as best as you can without making them look like the original Yahoo. Different url's linking back help increase your score. If they get you 2% more hits every month then you are 2% ahead for copying and pasting an advertisement to a database somewhere. When it gets taken down in six months for lack of updates, oh well, it was free.

Tweets that get sucked into the ether by retweeters are good too. However, it is not as guaranteed a method because they are simple text messages and can carry less information than the free poster sites. By all means, spam the web with your message. With billions if not trillions of pages, make sure that you get your information out there in as many places as possible.

Blogging is my last idea, but it is not as effective. Just from a time perspective you have to keep putting into it and that makes it more expensive than just chucking out some posters. Posters are good because you can have a graphical message. Even back in the day...
Tamany Hall said they did not care what they wrote, their constituents could not read... They could UNDERSTAND pictures.

Get Your Buzz Gear

Hey everyone,

I just got the Buzz Gear store set up. Please help the cause, get some great Buzz stuff. I make pennies on it, but advertising is awesome.

Let me know if you would like to see something else, I tried to have a selection of stuff.

Thanks,
Adam

I almost forgot

Prototype two's wing is now almost complete. It will be mated to the fuselage hopefully tonight. I must have really bollocksed up using the pattern that I made on the first plane. It is a different diameter than the first. The second prototype has a more tear drop shaped fuselage that the first aircraft. I think it will make it easier to shore up the system with stringers than the purely round shape.

What I am Thinking At the Moment

At the moment, I am trying to decide what is the most interesting way to proceed with this blog. It is important to discuss some of the howto aspects of UAVs and autopilots. I think that it is also important to speak about some of the interesting applications and business difficulties of it as well.

At the moment, there are many stories in the news about blowing up bad guys with thunder bolts from the sky. However, I think that this is not the most interesting thing to be done with the technologies. We are investigating a number of small-scale recycled materials and techniques to apply energy reclamation systems so that the uavs harvest as much of their energy from the environment and recycle as much as they can.

For the record, the soybean epoxies available are just not as good as their petro-chemical equivalents. We are still trying to use them in our skin layups. If we can make use of them, they do come from a renewable resource stream. These adhesives are not recyclable though.

Another big idea, that Buzz Labs is working on is the heat pipe system to pull heat away from the motors and batteries and either use that to generate trickle charges or to be able to cool the batteries to a point that we can keep their chemistries from over heating down to the limit of their endurance. Lithium-polymer (LiPo) batteries do have some physical limitations that make exciting failures possible. Read about the exploding notebook batteries. Buzz's engineers are seeing some success with maintaining battery temperatures even above their rated currents. Battery performance increases are especially good news for the racers and autonomous vehicle systems

We will keep you posted here as we make significant breakthroughs or cool flaming rc parts.