Thanks for your responses everyone.
Firstly I hope that hobby stores in Australia work with metric units because I have no idea what an ounce weighs and how much a gallon is.
- I was wondering if anyone has any close up photos of a reciever unit. Having never seen one I was wondering how they connect to the sevo's and power and what the "ports" look like.
- Also, is the power to the servo's usually centralised at the reciever?
- Is it possible to interchange servos? Whatabout recievers....if your reciever dies do you need to buy a new transmitter as well?
I am rather suprised that someone studying aeronautics hasn't spent thier life building and flying model airplanes.
this is the first time I have had the financial means to have a serious go at it. Modelling isn't really popular in our community as well (which sucks) the nearest modelling club and hobby store is a fair distance from where I live.
The UAVs that I've seen on the web (at least the one's that actually did anything interesting) were assembled by teams of engineering students, not just one guy.
I didn't make it clear. Our final year projects/thesis are team based.
Building UAV's in the manner in which you are proposing has become fairly commonplace and can be built almost entirely from "off the shelf" components. I don't know how impressive your thesis would be considering it is little more than purchasing consumer products and assembling them. It seems like a dead thesis walking to me.
However, you can gain a very valuable and practical understanding of airfoils which is far beyond thier qualities and quantities described in text books. And you can actually gain experience using new materials and new constuction techniques.
the course I am doing is entirely avionics based. We are primarily concerned with control systems. We are expected to be able to design those "of the shelf" components from scratch. The main goal for this year is to program the UAV to take off and land BY ITSELF [X(]. A daunting task. Remeber also that it's only a bacelor level thesis. We are not expected to do something that's never been done before.
This is the site. CHeck it out.
http://www.bee.qut.edu.au/projects/q...rgraduate.html