Propulsion

Our servo motors and propeller holder experienced vibrations when we were yawing and pitching. They have a detrimental effect to our ability to control the balloon and thus hindered our flight performance. Hence, the pitch and yaw servos were screwed to the attachment part and the servos’ arms were screwed in to the servos themselves. As a result, we now have more stability whenever we yaw or pitch since the vibrations in our equipment have been minimised.

Avionics

Due to faults in our previous ESC, we re-soldered a new ESC to the circuit. This also helped us to eliminate our existing throttling issue: The throttle cuts off whenever we yaw or pitch. Now, we are able to control the throttle, yaw and pitch simultaneously.

Payload

The speaker was deemed too heavy and caused pitching issues due to its large moment about the CG. Thus, it was removed. Instead, we focused on enhancing the surveillance capability, which was upgrading our camera to one with a higher resolution. However, as this new camera required a 4.2V power source, we removed the LiPo battery that was used for the old camera and added a lightweight powerbank to power the new camera.

Flight

Final Flight

Post-Flight review

Though straight flight has been thoroughly successful, the same cannot be said for pitching. When the blimp is pitched up continuously, it deviates clockwise and thus moves upwards in a slow and spiral path. Despite adjusting the propellers and repositioning avionics, it is almost impossible to get them down to such precision. Furthermore, manually fine-tuning an already imperfect blimp is rather futile. Ultimately, we decided to conclude our project here with Version 4, and it will be used as our final product.