Fifth Time in the Air

Fully loaded and air worthy:

Any yes, it flew! Here's the video to prove it:

And that's not all it did. The camera system works! It successfully takes pictures and video:

Stereo pictures! Might be uncomfortable to look at since the lens distance is not optimized for human viewing, but the depth data is there.

Still taken, synchronized and aligned by hand. There is one more part missing from the plane, and that is the circuit that will relay the data from the autopilot running on the phone to the servos. And part of that will also be automatic synchronised picture taking. As for the alignment, that will be the fun part once we have some real data.

And yes, there is also stereo video. Slightly easier for humans to watch, since distance between lenses is offset by the distance to the object in focus.

But unfortunately the video taken is slightly blurry.  Fault of the stock engine, which is not of the best quality and is causing much vibrations, which are also noticeable on the panoramic video. Not much can be done here but to replace the engine with something better.

And while we're at it, replace it with something more powerful, since while the plane flew, and it flew quite stable, it had horrible climb rate and required full throttle to maintain altitude.

Now with three cameras on board, there is one more flight video:

The landing could be better :P Not used to the extra weight, the runway was missed by 30cm, touching down on high grass and flipping over. So nothing but pride was broken.

And what would a report be without the visualization of the whole flight:

Unfortunately there was problem with the SD card in the phone, so not all the data was captured hence the lack of attitude visualization and force graphs.

All in all a very successful test flight. What works and what doesn't is known, so the next logical step is to work out the kinks and try again!