October 19, Monday

As we had powering issues and the LED on the receiver was not flashing, we suspected that the source of the issue came from either our battery or the ESC. However, after swapping around the batteries and using the lab’s power source to connect to our circuit, we realised that the receiver’s LED was still not flashing. As such, we isolated the problem to the ESC and swap it out with a new one.

Learning from our last attempt, we now know that we are not supposed to solder wires to the holes on the circuit board directly. This results in poor connection and is a dangerous practice. We soldered a pinhead on the ESC before soldering the wires of coreless motors to the pinhead. The pinhead serves as a connecting platform between the ESC and the coreless motors of the propellers. We also redid the soldering for the wires connected to the battery as there may be loose connections between the old wires and we did not want to risk having any more connection issues with our new ESC set.

After assembling the circuit and attaching it onto the blimp, we tried to fly again. Our persistent issue of throttle cut-off when we pitched or yawed was solved! We were also able to have a continuous and stable thrust as we steered the blimp around. Most importantly, this gave us a lot more control over the blimp. Continuing from our last attempt before it got cut short, we continued manually adjusting the propellers’ positioning. However, there were no improvements, the maximum distance our blimp can fly straight without any steering is still ~6m. Thanks to our expended control over the blimp, we then attempted straight flight with yawing allowance.

 

 

This was a success! Straight flight was possible with minute adjustments during flight. We made multiple attempts and all had a relatively straight path.

 

 

Also, the pitching mechanism was able to work and we observed that pitching is more pronounced when the throttle was relatively high.