The Carbon fibre tube is ready for the main wing of the PAL MKIII. Pictured here are two 4m lengths of 20mm diameter, 1mm wall thickness Carbon fibre tubing.

The Mark III wing, designed on SolidWorks by Sam Connor.

Wingspan: 3.6m
Chord Length: 0.88m
Density: 140 kg/m^3
Modulus of rigidity: 3.4 GPa
Modulus of rupture: 21.6 MPa

Photos of the new premises. The construction of the Mark III Prototype starts this weekend!

We have just signed the lease on our new premises, which we will start to move in to next week. It is a humble abode with 25m^2 of workspace but measures perfectly to fit construction of the MKIII prototype aircraft.

We plan to have construction of the MKIII under-way on the 9th of October, the workshop will be ready by then and we should be able to get the entire crew together for a huge push.

We now also have a dedicated CAD computer with a decent nVidia Quadro graphics card. Sam Connor has proved its performance with a couple of Solid Works simulations and renderings. I have no doubt this computer will be one of our best investments.

Keep checking back with us and thanks for following our progress.

Things are moving along nicely here at WARP. We are continuing to develop our PAL MKIII aircraft, the primary wing dimensions are now approximately 4m x 1m. Sam Connor has tested and decided on a glue to hold the components the MKIII together. Jacques has kindly donated his double garage as a construction site for the MKIII, which will be temporary until we can find a suitable premises for all of our requirements. Further inroads are being made in electronics and software development. We are currently developing a flight simulator to test our autopilot system. Jacques has narrowed down a cost effective and extremely accurate way of producing our PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards), allowing us to produce professional, quality electronics systems. Our ground station software is under heavy development, as this will be the interface for our customers using our UAV products, it needs to be user friendly and feature packed.

Keep up to date by checking the site and forums on regular basis.

Thanks for following our progress 🙂

Jacques has managed to hack our digital camera. Giving us control of Zoom In/Out, Focus, Capture and Power On/Off via a small breakout board and an Arduino micro controller. This means we can take high resolution (8MP) snap shots remotely via the Arduino-XBee ground station. Images are stored locally and recovered from the camera later. We will post some images from the flight of the PAL MKII Refit soon.

Tristan and Sam Connor have finalised the specifications of the primary wing and Sam has finished modelling the aerofoil shape for the MKIII prototype. We should be able to begin construction very soon 🙂

After looking the data from our last flight we have produced a vector diagram to show the MKII’s speed over ground and bearing when it was is flight.

Tristan is writing a function for project EMMA to determine the wind direction and speed from this data. Also we should be able to determine the average air speed of the MKII which will help towards designing the MKIII prototype.

NOTE: Up is true north. The speeds are in knots multiplied by 4.5 to obtain pixels.

We have been doing some heavy development on Project EMMA, primarily becuase it’s the easiest to do in our spare time. We now have functions for ZFS, Cron, Google Maps, GPS NMEA Data, Serial Interfaces, 3D Visualisation and have made the move to SVG for all of our graphing and image generation. The main reason for switching to SVG, is to move some load off of the server and onto the clients. This will also bypass some issues with browser caching.

I have also made some minor changes to the Project Auto Launch template, on the EMMA GUI. More GPS information is displayed, graphs are generated using SVG, and they are also reversed showing newest data from the left(this feels more natural when reading live telemetry from the plane).

The image shown is the new PAL interface. We reached a top speed of 41.11 kts (76.13kph / 21.15ms-1) that day, total flight time was 15 minutes, the battery was drained almost to half, which is what we expected from the 1350mAh LiPo battery. We should be able to achieve at least an hour of flight time, with our new 2600mAh battery.

The new picKit3 programmer has arrived. I will be spending every spare moment testing the UAV board now that we finally have the ability to program it. So far everything looks good.

Here is our new baby 🙂

Christian has produced a magnificent logo for our company, there are 4 variations and an icon for websites/applications that will hold the WARP name.

We will be modifying the website soon to incorporate the new logo, stay tuned.

We have ordered a picKit3 directly from MicroChip, this only set us back around $90 NZD. I can’t wait for this to arrive so we can really start testing the UAV board. Shipping time is 1 week.

We have decided on a concept for our logo and are now awaiting the final proof which should be ready in about a week.

We have been working hard testing the new electronic components for Auto Launch. The OpenLog works perfectly and as expected. We have successfully logged multiple hours of data to the device and then have been able to plug the MicroSD card directly into the computer and access that data with absolute ease. We highly recommend this device to anyone looking for an all in one serial logging system.

The Venus GPS is also working as expected, outputting NMEA or Binary GPS data 10 times every second. I can’t wait to see what effect this has on the UAV system.

One small downer is the UAV board, we tried a cheaper programmer for the dsPIC and after many many hours attempting to program the dsPIC we have failed and conclude that the programmer is incapable of programming the UAV board. Our attempt to save money on the programmer was not a major problem other than wasted time. We are looking at better supported programmers now like the picKit2 or picKit3, the cost at the moment is a small hindrance, but we will be purchasing one of these shortly.

We are in the process of designing a logo and look and feel for WARP, our designer is Christian Burgos has achieved the NCEA Graphics L3 Scholarship for NZ, Christian is a young fresh new designer and we think his style is in-line with ours at WARP.

The UAV dev board v2 from Sparkfun has arrived, a big thanks goes out to Tim Carr at Mindkits for organising this.

It is intended that this UAV board will provide all of our unmanned flight control and navigation. It has 3 gyroscopes, a triple axis accelerometer and a powerful dsPIC processor.

The other components we ordered this time include:

OpenLog – A tiny Serial to Micro SD card recorder powered by the ATMega 328. This will serve as a black box for our experiments in the likely event of catastophic failure, with flames.

VenusGPS – A 10Hz GPS unit for high speed GPS tracking information; this will hopefully improve the accuracy of the UAV system. We look forward to contributing to the MatrixNav software which powers the UAV board by adding support for this inexpensive but powerful GPS.