Bryon Blog-O-Rama

And here’s the obligatory time-lapse video. Note that the previously posted Sawzall video was made during the middle of this process.

Jay & Lois Porch Demolition from Jay Bryon on Vimeo.

Insert 50′s Sci-Fi movie sound here. Giant radioactive mutant termite attack!

Okay, I will admit it, I was the termite. I was a six-one termite armed with a Milwaukee 15Amp corded Super Sawzall. Which, by the way, Rocks.

2×4′s were no match for me. Wainscoting put up laughable resistance. 4×4′s with sistered 2×4′s fell to my reciprocal wrath. Well, actually it was orbital wrath, as that is more aggressive and what you use for wood demo apparently.

I even made a cartoonish video of cutting a me-shaped hole through the wood wall. Unfortunately it was wainscotting again and kinda flew apart mid-way. But you still get the idea.
Sawzall
Slideshow of my rather sudden progress to follow.

I’m building, slowly, a largish RC flying wing aircraft with an Ardupilot autopilot. It has a slew of sensors, airspeed/altimeter pressure unit, IR horizon sensors, Magnetic compass, a really nice GPS and finally an IMU unit that I might not be able to integrate yet (may need to wait for the mega-ardupilot), and should be able to carry a decent sized camera for aerial photography and video.

So the spec I’m trying to design for boils down to:

• Lift capability of a several pounds
• Payload Modules that are swappable, including a DLSR mount, Video, science sensors TBD etc.
• Significant range (uses same style battery as my other wing, but two of them)
• Telemetry link
• Power and system status data logging and telemetry
• Lighting system (anti-collision and art lighting)
• Future upgrades and expansion

I’m also thinking forward to being able to enable robotic behaviors over the base autopilot logic to enable it to do interesting things. Examples include a GPS and air speed correlation to enable it to learn how to cliff soar to conserve power. Using the uplift of air over a hill it may be possible for the Dronewing to either loiter more slowly than usual or possibly cut off power use to the electric motor entirely and soar for hours. This may be beyond my programming ability, but I can dream.

One interesting problem I haven’t resolved yet in design is how to land it safely. Most EPP-Foam wings just belly slide in without landing gear because they’re so tough. The camera is less so, so unless I mount it high, I may need to do landing gear. Sadly that increases weight, so I’m hoping to avoid it.

Also launching what could end up being a 6-8 pound bird could get exciting, I’m used to tossing a 2lb Mini XE into the air and going. I may have to either do some sort of rail launcher, or more excitingly do a rocket boost launch. This would be challenging due to the fact it’s a pusher prop, but could be done with an eject-able assembly.
Besides, JATO is cool!

Well, after seeing some really nicely formatted blogs out there, I’ve decided to go ahead and start using the catagory function. Initially when I started this silly little blog I just felt it was a solution without a problem, and a needless complication. But now I think I’ve got so many projects going on right now that it will be possibly useful.

So far I’ve got categories for:

Dronewing Project (Large RC plane with autopilot and camera essentially)
Haus Remodel (our House remodel, obviously, all our time-lapse stuff etc)
Airplane Build (future, mostly, although I will be doing a class this weekend).

And I’ll add ones for other projects, but I think I’ll use the “actually doing it” metric before creating a category so I don’t end up with empty page syndrome. In fact, I won’t create the above categories until I do the first real post for each.

Here goes…