tomstanton

Electromagnetic Coil Launcher

Turbine Dragster

After nearly 6 years of air engine development, it's time to start exploring turbines more! There's still a lot of development and testing to do, but with the new dynomometer, I'm determined to find a turbine that'll out perform my air powered plane record!

Super Capacitor Plane

Optimising an Air Engine

Magnetic Bike Transmission

V22 Testing

I'm in the process of building another VTOL, but this time it's going to be a scale V22 Osprey with swashplateless helicopter rotor heads (one of these on each wingtip https://youtu.be/d80oXSCcHTk). I believe it's the first time a swashplateless rotor head had been built with 3 blades and it works surprisingly well. Only issue is currently the frame/wing spar has a resonant frequency which is very similar to the rotor head RPM, so I've had to add some strengthening spars. I've ordered a larger diameter spar to hopefully reduce the flex and then it'll be time to build a scale fuselage around it!

I'm building a new VTOL

After building 4 previous bicopter style VTOL aircraft, I thought I'd give it another go with some pretty significant upgrades. This is the first test hover using a new flight controller made from a Teensy 4.0 and an MPU6050 running arduino based code called dRehmFlight (https://github.com/nickrehm/dRehmFlight). It was created by Nick Rehm and so far I'm very impressed with the performance! I'll do some more tuning once it has a wing and tail! 

Speaking of wings, I've spent a few weeks designing a 3D printable wing that can be printed with zero retractions, which makes it very easy and fast to print, as well as being lightweight!

Vortex Propulsion

Flywheel Trebuchet Release Mechanism

A few have asked about the release mechanism, so here it is! The release is consistent and the timing doesn't vary much over the rotational speed range. The final slow mo launch was 56m/s (125mph), which is just over the fastest speed my old trebuchet could fire!

Flywheel Trebuchet First Test

Hope everyone is well! This project has been on my list for a long time and I've finally built it!! The flywheel is 0.8m in diameter and weighs 1.9kg. Including the weight of all the arms, the total moment of inertia is about 1.1kgm ² . I've carried out a few physics simulations and think I can launch the tennis ball at 200mph (89m/s) with it spinning at 270rpm. I can only spin it up to about 120rpm directly by hand, so I will add a belt and pulley ratio to get it going faster!

Swashplateless Helicopter

Hope everyone is well! I've been busy working on a helicopter that uses a single motor for control. Conventional helicopters require servo controlled swashplates to adjust the blade angle during it's rotation. However, this setup varies the motor torque causing the blades to lead/lag, which adjusts the blade angle due to the 45 degree hinge. It's taken a lot of problem solving to get this system working and I've just test flown it today for the first time (it still needs quite a bit of tuning). Now I need to put everything into a final video, but first, a quick run down of the system. 

 The motor is a standard brushless motor (Tarot 4006) and is controlled with an off the shelf drone speed controller (T-motor F35A). There is a diametric magnet epoxied to the bottom of the motor shaft, and a magnetic encoder mounted 2mm below it. This measures the exact angle of the motor 2500 per second (75 measurements per rotation @2000RPM). Then a Teensy 3.6 board runs an arduino code to read the angle and apply a Sine/Cos wave output to the throttle setting. The amplitude of the Sin/Cos wave determines the amount of roll/pitch control. This throttle output value is then sent to the motor controller 500 times per second and acheives full cyclic control!

Here is the original source of this concept: https://youtu.be/aEPf0QHVuMM

Flywheel Projectile

Hope everyone is well! Apologies for the lack of uploads recently. I've made this available for all Patrons as a thanks for the continued support! 

Coanda Effect Drone - Update

Solar Electric Bike Charging

Solar ebike charging - Patreon Update

Drone Pendulum Fallacy

Apologies for the lack of updates recently, the gas thruster drone project left me with no spare time to think of the next project. I think I might start alternating between complex hardware projects (such as the gas thruster drone) and simpler theory projects (such as this and the trebuchet parachute video).

For my next project, I want to experiment with the Coanda effect. I'm not sure exactly what to do with it yet, but maybe some sort of coanda quadcopter.

Gas Thruster RCS Drone - Update

As you can probably tell from the title, I've been working on a drone which is controlled using compressed air!

It's main source of lift is produced by the two propellers in the central blue duct, which only provides yaw control. The pitch and roll are controlled by exhausting compressed air from 3 nozzles positioned at the tips of each arm. 

I was going to make an update video of the setup, but as I haven't tested it yet, I thought I'd leave it till the final video, which I'm aiming to finish this week (still lots to do!).

I've spoken with Joe Barnard (BPS.Space) regarding his recent RCS endeavours (His video: https://youtu.be/10Pdl0Omet8 ) and he's given me a lot of information regarding the valve triggering control system. 

I'm aiming for some test flights (hopefully not crashes) over the next day or so and have the video ready for next Friday (or Wednesday/Thursday for early access).

Apologies for the lack of information as I'm rushing to get this tested with the shockingly ok weather here in the UK. Let me know if you have any questions!

Patreon Update - Gravitational Potential Energy Transfer

Super Capacitor Rocket

Air Powered Bike - Update

Bicycle Anti-lock Braking System Test!

It's been a busy weekend getting this anti-lock braking system ready for testing, but it's finally getting there! I haven't got the time to make a full update video because I'd like to get the finalised video out this week. 

In terms of the testing, I've tried three different methods of brake release triggering. The first was to release the brake when the wheel speed equals zero, which took about 0.24s to trigger the stepper motor. The second was to activate the brake release when the deceleration passed a certain limit, but this proved to be unreliable as occasionally the wheel would slowly decelerate to a skid and therefore not trigger the brake release (this caused the final crash in the video). 

The final solution was the slip ratio limit. I mentioned this in the previous update video, where I explained I would use an accelerometer to estimate the velocity of the bike, and it actually worked! It's a little out on the estimation (as you can see from the graph), but it's enough to calculate large changes in slip ratio and reduces the 'skid to brake release' time to 0.07s.

The issue now is the speed of the stepper motor. It takes about 0.25s for it to release the brake, which is about 3.5x longer than the arduino detection/trigger time. That being said, I've still managed to reduce the overall response time by about 35%, which I'll take as a success!

Update - Bicycle Anti-lock brakes Part 2

Update - Bicycle Anti-lock brakes

Research paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1474667016379174

Reaction wheels and more - Update

Hope everyone has had a merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

Over the holidays, I've become a bit obsessed with reaction wheels and am working on a reaction wheel drone. I was planning on making a progress video for you guys last week, but I'm still waiting for parts.

Reaction wheels are used in small satellites for attitude control and work by accelerating a high inertia wheel to rotate a craft in the opposite direction. I'm not sure how viable this is for controlling a drone, but it's really interesting from a physics perspective. This video is an example of a reaction wheel balancing an inverted pendulum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woCdjbsjbPg

For those of you that are interested in my ebike projects, I think I might be able to implement this reaction wheel concept for another use. After researching inverted pendulums, I've found a method of setting up a control system to adjust a balance point depending on the rotational velocity of the reaction wheel. This could make a wheelie device actually possible as it'll account for my body weight shifting. It's still very early stages of this idea as I haven't done the maths for it yet, but I think it would be awesome to have bike auto balance without having to motorise/brake the rear wheel.

In terms of projects for 2019, I want to try some more complex long term projects. Projects that require science, electronics, 3D printing and CNC stuff (mixed together). I really enjoyed working on projects such as the trebuchet and ebike, rather than small projects that I have to rush to upload on a weekly basis. So I think for the next month or so, I'm going to try working on projects that take more time and will upload progress videos on here.

Thanks once again for all your support!

Tom

Vacuum or Atmosphere powered car?

I've been working on a small car that is powered by pulling a vacuum inside of a syringe and using it as a pneumatic spring. This then drives the wheels in the same way a mouse trap car works. 

Here is a demo video of it working: https://youtu.be/I4fbJHpS3E0

As fluids (air) flow from high pressure zones to low pressure zones, it's actually the atmosphere pushing the piston towards the nozzle of the syringe rather than the vacuum sucking. So technically this is an atmosphere powered car right?

My view is that it stores energy in the atmosphere by theoretically raising the atmosphere by a minuscule (immeasurable) amount, therefore increasing the gravitational potential energy of the atmosphere? Same as if you were to expand a syringe in a small tub of water, the water level would rise. So what's your view, is it vacuum powered or atmosphere powered?

One last thing, that syringe in the video is 5ml in volume and I have a 100ml syringe waiting for a radio controlled car version! Which according to my calculations, should be able to drive about 300m distance!

SpaceX Starship!

Just landed on the surface of Mars... and there seems to be grass and trees!

SpaceX BFS project

I'm currently in the process of designing a radio control SpaceX BFS (Big Falcon Ship), which is the second stage of the BFR. Essentially what I'm aiming to do is test how the fins will be used to control the craft on decent. They work similar to how my RC wingsuit guy 'worked', where the fins won't rotate like an aircraft's control surfaces, but instead pivot about the parallel axis of the rocket. Here is a video explaining it better: https://youtu.be/CbevByDvLXI?t=348

So I thought I'd come to you guys to get some opinions! 

First option: I've been working on a version (seen in the photo below) that will use the same thrust vectoring technique as my previous spaceX rocket project to gain altitude. Then when at altitude, it'll attempt to descend belly first (black half of the rocket facing down) by moving the fins. The only issue is that this isn't going to be light weight due to the motor and battery required for thrust, so it might just drop like a rock(et without a parachute).

Second option: Build a much simpler version which has no thrust source, but still has control of the fins. This can then be dropped from a drone and hopefully be controlled for a slow decent.

My personal view is that I'd like to got for the fully thrust vectored design, but I have an odd feeling it has a much lower chance of success haha.

RC VTOL V4!

Writing code is surprising enjoyable (when it works), especially when it enables a plane to take off and land with zero forward velocity! This weeks video is a complicated one, but hopefully interesting and informative!

Lift at zero velocity

Can anyone guess which wing concept I am testing here? 

HINT: The propeller is sucking air through the red 3D printed part and is producing lift.

Ebike 4.0 CAD files

A few have requested the ebike 4.0 CAD files and I'm not sure the best way to share them. So I've exported the whole model as .iges and .step. Hope this is of use to some of you! Please be safe if you want to build your own ebike and as a disclaimer: these files are only to be used for legal electric bike setups depending on your region. Using these files with illegal electric bike components will void any responsibility linked back to myself. 

Enjoy!