Introduction #
When selecting electronic components for our plane, we wanted to make sure that they worked over the entire range of the flight while also being easy to configure. When selecting our motors, we wanted to optimize both power and range. Therefore, we focused on having reliable testing infrastructure in this competition year.
Flight Controller #
For our plane this year, we realized that it would be easier to select our avionics components like servos and other sensors first, and select a flight controller (FC) that supports all of our required equipment on the plane. Therefore, we first brainstormed a list of components we wanted the FC to support which included:
- ELRS Reciever
- Telemetry Radio
- GPS
- Object avoidance electronics
- Landing electronics
- Controls surface servo ports
- Aileron
- Flaps
- Tails
- Steerable landing gear
- Kill Switch
- Throttle
- FPV Camera
- Airspeed Sensor(s)
We also wanted our FC to be price-efficient, so we considered several options that fit our general requirements:
- Pix32 v6
- Holybro Pixhawk4
- Pixhawk 6C
- Kakute H743 Wing
- iFlight BLITZ Wing H743
- Mateksys H743-Wing
- SpeedyBeeF405WING
We ended up choosing the Mateksys H743-Wing for its wide availability of ports for the aforementioned requirements, and its great compatibility with Ardupilot.
Motor Selection #
Our approach to motor selection this year was a fair bit more involved this year because we wanted to accurately model motor performance in flight. For this, we would need some way of testing the dynamic thrust of motors. We did not have the budget of a full-blown wind-tunnel, so we instead build a rig and software stack that would allow us to the motors on a car.
The motor test stand was designed to mount on top of the car, and we designed a custom electronics package that uses an Arduino ESP-32 Nano board to measure the voltage and current pulled by the motors and wirelessly communicates with a laptop. The electronics package sends the data over a UDP stream to synchronize data in real time with accurate timestamp. This data can then be plotted to help analyze motor performance like thrust and efficiency.