SmartFish is a fish shaped airplane. The project is about building a complete navigation system and ground station for it. The first big experiment will be an autonomous flight from a balloon at 15km of altitude. The experiment is part of the RexusBexus campaign for 2009. Here there is more information about the project and the team.
-
Autopilot final electronics
Posted on March 19th, 2010 No commentsMore news,
the final hardware version of the autopilot is done, and now it has passed to the testing and validation phase at the laboratory.
Autopilot Hardware
The first board is the core of the autopilot with two microcontrollers, the GPS, the SD card and the power stage. Second floor is the quiet system, the analog part, with the inertial unit, magnetometers, and pressure sensors.
There are still missing a small heater, on a third floor, and a little expansion board with the final radio-modem authorized by the Rexus-Bexus crew, it is currently used in satellites and high-altitude airplanes with more than 100Km of range! At this moment we are interfacing the autopilot with the little X-Bee radios (this little blue board in the picture) with more than 2Km of range, more than enough for testing the electronics in Madrid.
It is too "heavy"!
Yesterday we planned the next Saturday experiment session, including the taking off of the Smart-Fish (the Space-Fish but with electric motor), everything seems right, all the checking has been done… now only one thing left.. to fly!
-
Space-Fish and Rexus-Bexus at Barajas Airport
Posted on March 16th, 2010 No commentsOnly a short break before the news that are incoming next week. Until the end of March, the SpaceFish project is exposed in the Terminal 2 at the Barajas Airport with other planes from our RC club.. The Rexus-Bexus program and the Space-Fish is being promoted with a Smart-Fish copy and several photographs and posters of our work. Thousands of people are passing day by day watching the exposition and several national newspapers have published this new. We hope everybody enjoy this exposition as much as we do!
SmartFish at the Barajas Airport
-
Molds finished
Posted on March 15th, 2010 No comments
Space-Fish frontal
Yes! We are so proud announcing we have finished the molds production. NB Composites has done an excellent work as you can see in the photos, the work is amazing, and now the SpaceFish is more than a 3D CAD representation. Next step is to bring the molds to Spain and start the Space-Fish production to fly it. Kamil is in conversations with some transport companies, we hope to arrange a safe transport during this week from Poland.
Space-Fish top part
How is it going our work at the laboratory? The final autopilot electronics is almost done, and its firmware is being developed further day by day with our experiments in boats and trainer planes. We will try to post some photos from our experiments during this week.
Oh! We forgot to tell you, it seems the rain in Madrid is going to stop, giving us a break to start a serious campaign of flight testing, and that includes flying our Smart-Fish this Saturday. This week is going to be an exciting week, fingers croosed!
