Third Time in the Air (MK5)

Endurance flight, to see how long, how high and how accurate can the plane be flown. And to get some practice and have some fun.

About 15 minutes of flying with all the gear on board, total distance traveled just over 13 kilometers and 220 meters of altitude difference:

On the graph you can clearly see the approach and low flyover the runway, then rapid acceleration while gaining some altitude to circle around and try again.

Visualization and Realization

Today's challenge, visualize sensor data and find out what's wrong and how to fix it.

Step one, visualization (partial for now, other sensors and animated map in next iteration):

Well, looking at the attitude meter at the bottom left, one could see that the orientation data from the sensor is useless.

Looking at it even closer, one could see that the orientation data starts to drift as soon as the engine is turned on. Even before it's set to full power, where there are visible vibrations.

Could it be that the motor itself if distorting the magnetic field enough to skew the sensors? Do the vibrations from the motor play a part? Is there something else?

Previous incarnation worked with less capable hardware and better results.

Visualization Makes Data in to Pretty Pictures

Things may look like they're progressing slowly, but looks can be deceiving.

Take large datasets for example. Wall of numbers like this is an awesome thing for a computer, not so much for a human:

And this is just the navigational data from a quick flight in FlightGear with the RC2USB module, someday to be piped in to an autopilot.  Forget about the amount of attitude data used to keep the planed levelled.

To better "see" what's going on, we plot the data in to google earth:

With the code prom the previous project, we can see where and when, but not exactly what is going on. We can do better.

With some work, we can get a nice "heat map" of speed.

And once we know how to do that, we can visualize altitude. Can you guess what was the highest point of the flight?

Mix it all together, and we get a lot more information from the same image. Now, when we can "see better", we're ready to tackle on the autopilot.

P.S. Want to make pretty pictures like this? Start reading: https://developers.google.com/kml/documentation/