RedTwenty
Member
Good evening!
I will do an article on the main FT site, but they take soooooo long to get approved I couldn't wait to show off the new idea...
For various reasons I wanted to design a low cost UAV platform that was lightweight and efficient. True to form, I also wanted to use foam board to build it!
I took inspiration from the Predator and Reaper military drones and put some ideas together in Sketchup...
These were then quickly transferred to foam using the Flattery plugin and the cutting commenced. As usual the process was pretty quick so by this evening, and after only a few working hours I ended up with...
It's a folded wing in the same style as the FT Spitfire, Simple Soarer etc. Tube fuselage with a double skin nose section for strength.
The complete airframe weighs in at 15.8 ounces (450g), which is pretty impressive for a 6ft model build with "heavy" Australian foam board.
I'm putting a Park 480 in the tail for motive power and will be installing a GoPro (maybe also a board cam later), FatShark/Immersion RC 5.8 FPV, and MegaPilot flight controller with GPS for use with Mission Planner. I'm sure more will be added as I think of it!
Anyway, this was just a quick look at what I am doing. There is a huge build article on my blog at Red20RC.org if you want to learn more before the FT article comes out.
Cheers,
Mike
I will do an article on the main FT site, but they take soooooo long to get approved I couldn't wait to show off the new idea...
For various reasons I wanted to design a low cost UAV platform that was lightweight and efficient. True to form, I also wanted to use foam board to build it!
I took inspiration from the Predator and Reaper military drones and put some ideas together in Sketchup...
These were then quickly transferred to foam using the Flattery plugin and the cutting commenced. As usual the process was pretty quick so by this evening, and after only a few working hours I ended up with...
It's a folded wing in the same style as the FT Spitfire, Simple Soarer etc. Tube fuselage with a double skin nose section for strength.
The complete airframe weighs in at 15.8 ounces (450g), which is pretty impressive for a 6ft model build with "heavy" Australian foam board.
I'm putting a Park 480 in the tail for motive power and will be installing a GoPro (maybe also a board cam later), FatShark/Immersion RC 5.8 FPV, and MegaPilot flight controller with GPS for use with Mission Planner. I'm sure more will be added as I think of it!
Anyway, this was just a quick look at what I am doing. There is a huge build article on my blog at Red20RC.org if you want to learn more before the FT article comes out.
Cheers,
Mike