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.
--
Curtis Olson: http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/
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