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Thursday, 18 November 2010

Success!

After my first attempt at Brazing, and subsequently melting two of the motor arms, I did a little more research and found Hts-2000 Aluminium repair from AET Systems Ltd. This stuff has a melting point of around 400 degrees C in comparison with Aluminium which melts at 690 degrees C. Last time I was using Aluminium rods to try and braze aluminium. (It was the first attempt in my life at brazing so I think it was a valid mistake. I figured aluminium brazing rods meant they were for brazing aluminium and not made out of aluminium. Even slightly more usefull packaging would have sorted that out for me before buying it from B&Q.

Here is the first of three arms with Motor Mounting plates attached:

Wednesday, 3 November 2010

I just thought I would post a couple of foto's of the process of creating the motor mounting plates.

Here I have cut the 2milimeter strip into a triangle with holes in the right place.

Here is the first of the completed Motor Mounting plate, ready for brazing onto the motor arm.

Friday, 29 October 2010

Because I now have the motors and have the model just the way I want it, I figured I could spend just a little cash this month and start working on TriTor's Chassis components. Basically I will be building the arms to hold the motors in place. I've opted for aluminium since it is not only strong and light, but also easy to work with (I hope) in terms of joining peaces together by brazing. (I might add at this point that I have never brazed anything in my life but I have now racked up a couple of ours of training on YouTube ;-)

I bought a meter long piece of Aluminium tubing from B&Q (Hardware supermarket in the UK) and a sheet of 40mm x 2mm x 1m aluminium sheeting to build the motor arms:

The motor Mount should look like this:

Now, the problem I have at the moment is that I have absolutely no work area or work bench to work on. So doing this is quite hard work, but it's fun anyway. If it doesn't look absolutely perfect I'll rebuild the parts at some stage. So far I have been able to line the mounting holes on the motors up perfectly and cut the shape into a triangle. The one I made so far was basically a tester to see how I should go about building the ones I will actually use and none of it seems impossible yet.

I now basically have all the expensive parts left (Gyro's, Accelerometers, Radio, Receiver and the electronic speed controllers (ESC's)), so this will have to wait for the budget to be augmented first.

Let me know what you think at the e-mail address at the top.

Ps. I'll add all the bits to the parts list so you can keep track of the entire budget to date.

Sunday, 10 October 2010

I received my motors (I've updated the Parts List) in the mail on Friday and spent some of the weekend figuring out how I would mount these to TriRot's chassis and ended up creating most of the chassis in a free 3D modeling application (Google Sketchup). So far I have not included the Main interface board, the battery and the upper and lower retaining platforms, but the basic shape is there and scaled correctly so that I have a pretty good idea of how things would fit in once I start building the chassis.

What do you think?

Tuesday, 28 September 2010

It’s been my birthday recently and I have also been on leave for a bit and therefore have just not had the time to update my blog. The bonus is that I did get a couple of birthday presents to further the development of TriRot.

I think I have a pretty good circuit diagram for the Micro Processor Interface board.

I will now be bread-boarding the various components to see if all works as expected. I’ve also spent some time creating the actual board design. This was basically done as a proof of concept to make sure that the board would not be bigger that the entire tri-copter. At the moment I have the power lines for the motors running on the board which would have to be able to carry 10A at peak loads. According to my calculations ([link to track width calculator];-). I would also need some bigger Molex sockets for the cabling to the motors (ESC’s) to cope with the current. But at least I’ve proven that I should be able to fit the interface board onto TriRot. (I.E. don’t use this board as is, cause it probably won’t work yet)

I’ve now bought the motors, rotors and the circuit board components. (All Birthday presents) See the parts list. (I’ll keep my parts list up to date. Since I’ll be starting this from absolute scratch because I didn’t bring any components with me, from previous project, when we moved to the UK, I’ll be able to put absolutely every component into the parts list with pricing.

Tue, 31 Aug 2010

I am using a freeware version of Eagle (Applicable Graphical Layout Editor) Version 5.10.0 for windows by CadSoft Online. This is an excellent application (albeit not the most friendly or intuitive, but it is free). The libraries have almost every type of component you could wish for except for the FEZ Mini, which I am using in TriRot. After some quick google searches I didn't find a Library which includes the FEZ boards, but I did find an awesome set of training videos by "smackandy". Using his tutorials I have created a quick Library for the FEZ mini.

I have not actually created a working circuit with this library, but I have printed it out and the pin spacing and the board dimensions seem spot on.

Below you can see the Schematic.

and here you can see the Board layout.

Download the library here and save the unzipped lbr file into "C:\Program Files (x86)\EAGLE-5.10.0\lbr" or the equivalent location on your machine.

Then, let me know what you think.

Sun, 22/08/2010

Triple Rotor .Net Micro framework µFlyer

This weekend I took the plunge and bought the first bit of hardware for my next project. Inspired by William Bremen’s Shrediquette, I have decided to build TriRot.

TriRot will be a triple rotor micro flyer or a TriCopter.

I have decided to base mine on the Microsoft .Net Micro Framework using what seems to be a very capable board known as FEZ Mini from Tiny CLR. This board runs a 72MHz ARM Processor running the .Net Micro Framework and measures just 4.8cm x 2.8cm (1.88" x 1.10").

Parts List (To Date)

I have been doing research for about 2 months now on parts, components, materials and software needed for this project. I'll be keeping this page up to date with my progress as te project continues.

At the moment, I'm designing the Master Micro Controller Interface Board which will facilitate all interfacing with the FEZ Mini board. I'm doing this with Eagle Version 5.10 (Free version from http://www.cadsoftusa.com/).

Until next time.

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