Robotics: Crenn's Third Year Project

As some of you may have heard from my talking in the chat, I'm currently trying to make a plane/helicopter twin bladed VTOL (think V22 Osprey) as my third year project.

Our group is made up of 4 people and we each have our specialisations. I'm in the process of designing the electronics and interfacing with everything in the project. We're planning to be using a Atmel ATMega640 running at 16MHz with a complement of servos, speed controllers and more.

Why am I suddenly making the post tonight? Because we caused a speed controller to burst into flames! How you say? The development board we're using has a voltage regulator dedicated for servos and it's meant to output 5.6v.... it was putting out 9v. We had been working with a normal servo most of time to get the signalling from the micro controller correct and decided to test with a speed controller (After we could control the servo fine) and that's when it popped and burst into flames.

Pictures to come tomorrow. Time for me to sleep.

EDIT: Temp links
http://www.scienceprog.com/avr-isp/
http://www.g.laroche.free.fr/english...e/ProgAVR.html

As promised, pictures:

This project is going to be so cool, please keep us posted!

Heheh, I love the smell of burning silicon in the morning. XD

OOC, what was the reason for the 2-rotor design?

Because it looks cool and also because we can lift upto 1.5kg (3.3lb) which is enough for all of our equipment.

Updates will be a little more regular now.

Ok, fair enough. I was just wondering since from what I've heard the control systems for 2-rotor vehicles are a lot more finicky than for 1- or 4-rotor vehicles. How big is it gonna be to be able to lift 1.5kg?

About 30 inches or so across including the 11x9 blades.

This is so sweet, I can't wait to see the finished product.

-Dave

Well, things are still happening, I'm currently designing the control board for the plane (and hoping I'm doing it right.) and hopefully I'll be etching it in a few days at the latest.

Here's a preview of what I've been upto:

Currently having a problem getting a copy printed out at a high enough resolution. The pads for the micro-controller have blended together, possibly due to the software not being able to print at a high enough resolution (printing at 600 dpi).