Raspberry Pi Forums

I want to make a Raspberry Pi controlled plane that can fly for 12 hours or longer. It will have a long wing span and be covered with light solar panels and powered by tiny energy efficient motors. How much would this cost and can I reach my goal? I don't want to have a ground control system. I want everything controlled by a pi and a motor driver board. This includes gps, barometer ect....

I know batteries are heavy but I want to fly in 12 hour flight times. I want to get power from the solar panels with no batteries and if there was a drop in power from the solar panels the motors would slow down. I want the craft to be light, efficient and autonomous but it does not need object avoidance but it would be a nice feature.

Sorry to disappoint you but this project is Pie in the Sky, in more senses than one.

I think you have the general knowledge to bring all the components together. I don't think you will be able to make it light enough to fly. If you follow the route you have used on previous projects, you will be asking here for people to help with every little bit of code, and every new bit of configuration.

Go googling, find out what other people have done, and what skills and experience they needed. Then research the technologies, especially the power system and integrating it to an airframe. Check the legislation about flying UAVs. Write everything down, make it coherent and comprehensible to other people (that's a project in itself). Then do some design work and specify components. Again, write it down ask ask other people about it -- preferably people who might know, not just Fred on the Forum (Flying Fred may be here, but most forum members have little or no specialist knowledge in this area.) Write a Risk Assessment -- what can go wrong, what are the consequences, and what can you do to make it safe(r). After that you might be ready to start thinking about hardware and programming.

Review the project you have done. What have you learnt? What worked, and what didn't. Where have you got beyond just re-using other people's stuff, and done any real creative work? Is anything applicable to your UAV? What new skills are you going to need? How do you get them? Build your UAV bit by bit, testing as you go -- the first flight is the wrong time to find it doesn't work.

Oh, and make a commitment to yourself. Whenever you post here or elsewhere, leave your draft post for at least an hour before posting. Re-read it, see if the words are clear and if it actually says what you want it to. Check all the spelling and grammar. Avoid pedantry unless it is important. If you can communicate more clearly, you will get better answers.

Sorry if this is not the answer you want. But you are aiming at a project that is many steps ahead of you experience, with big cost and safety implications. You must get there in small steps, it can't be done by jumping ahead in large leaps.

rpiswag

It seems to me that you are overflowing with youthful imagination, enthusiasm and optimism but are lacking in the skills, knowledge and experience required to realize your dreams.

I don't mean to be harsh when I say that, most of us here have been there, if you see what I mean, and we all have to start somewhere.

This project sounds wonderful but I might ask the following:

Have you ever built and flown a electric radio controlled model plan? That seem to be a good place to start. You need to be familiar with those motors, batteries, chargers, thrust, power to weight ratio and ton of other stuff involved in not having planes crash or get lost.

Have you ever designed such a plane from scratch? That would be a next step as you will need a custom design for your project.

Have you ever built a solar panel system that powers anything? You will need to know, as in measure, what power output you can get from what kind of panels. You will need to know how heavy that is going to be. How to handle charging batteries from solar panels and so on.

Have you ever built fly by wire system? You will need to know how to work with accelerometers, gyros, compass, barometer etc. How to control a plane from those instruments. Etc etc.

What about communication. You say you don't want a ground station, but you will need to know where your machine has gotten to otherwise it's probably lost.

Frankly if I achieved even one of those sub-projects I would be proud of myself.

By way of encouragement I would suggest you start with baby steps, like the above. None of which are so baby actually.

Here is a team from a school that built a solar powered plane with the help of their local university http://www.instructables.com/id/Introduction-47/. Nothing has complex as your dream but a good start. Even that team did not quite get the plane to recharge itself in flight.

Again I don't mean to me harsh in saying all this. I do encourage you to start with something less ambitious, something that will be a step in the direction you want to go.

Yes I have built and flown model aircraft. I do it a lot and it is my second favorite hobby next to computers. I enjoy the criticism actually and I have built a solar charging circuit and I fly my own custom airplanes but I don't know how to code with a gps, barometer and many other sensors and be able to use that information to get it to fly. All I want it to do is fly in a big circle and with the pi cam take pictures. I know enough python to make a tweeting bitcoin miner with a pi and my bitcoin miner.

rpiswag,

OK sounds like a good start.

Perhaps you should get yourself some hardware: accelerometer, gyro, compass. Basically an Inertial measurement unit (IMU). I like the look of FreeIMU opensource project http://www.varesano.net/projects/hardware/FreeIMU for which there are a few hardware suppliers like this one:
http://www.sdmodel.it/index.php?main_pa ... anguage=en

Of course there are many other IMU solutions as this is a big thing in flying quadcopters today.

With that and a barometer you can start playing with software to read and interpret that orientation/acceleration/altitude data.

Get yourself a GPS unit and see what can be done with that.


And so on, and so on....

Thanks!