Mission Space: DIYdrones.com and udrones.com

After doing some extensive research on UAV and complete autonomous flight, I came across an excellent website DIY Drones. This site is packed with other people's autonomous flight ideas and projects, as well as a store where you can buy airplane boards to turn your R/C plane into a UAV. After reading some posts and watching and looking at videos and photos of other people, I was more determined then ever to get this project going. Then I clicked the "Getting Started" tab to see where I would begin.

The blog's title after clicking the tab reads, "The newbie guide to UAVs", perfect! After reading "What is an amateur UAV?", "What do I need to make one?" and "What does DIY Drones have to offer?", it seems like this project can get pretty far before I have to go to college. I clicked on the links they provided which brought me to a wikilinks site that had step by step instructions on how to set your R/C plane to UAV mode. All you need is a $200 board called Adrupilot Mega 2.0, or APM for short. But then I came across another link which brought me to https://www.udrones.com/.

https://www.udrones.com is a online store that sells parts to turn your R/C plane into a UAV, or you can buy one of there "Almost-ready to fly" drones for $600, which is a R/C plane with ardupilot already included. After researching other sites to see how much a legitimate plane would cost and then buying the ardupilot with it as well, I figured that buying the entire package was worth the cost. The only problem is it takes 2-4 weeks to ship. So hopefully by mid July I will be up and running with this drone.

Mission Space: Project purpose and objective

Purpose: To find a way to get different payloads, i.e. satellites, chemicals, experimental instruments, or even people, into space at a reasonable price.


Objective: Launch a rocket into space using a launch pad attached to a weather balloon. Once successfully launched, the launch pad, which is on top of an airplane, comes back to a specific point to be used again.

Flight Phases:

    Phase 1 - Launch weather balloon with plane attached and rocket attached to plane.

    Phase 2 - Balloon rises up to reasonable height for launch (80,000+ ft).

    Phase 3 - Balloon pops, releases safety on the rocket.

    Phase 4 - Rocket launches from the plane and goes into orbit.

    Phase 5 - Plane begins its decent to specific location.

    Phase 6 - Plane is successfully recovered with video prof of rocket entering orbit.  

Mission Space: Welcome

Welcome!

Welcome to my Mission Space blog. Here you will find daily to weekly updates on problems, questions, solutions and materials I learned throughout this project. Before I start, let me give you a background about myself.

My name is Robert Zybrick, I live in Kinnelon, New Jersey and about two weeks ago I graduated from Kinnelon High School. I will be continuing my studies at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ and will be majoring in Mechanical Engineering and minoring in Business Administration. My goal once at Rowan is to bring the idea of aeronautics and aerospace into the mechanical engineering environment. Though Rowan focuses mostly on land vehicles, I believe interest in air and space vehicles is on the rise. Hopefully with the  lessons learned from this project, I can accomplish this goal.  


This blog will basically be my notes typed up and edited.


Follow my blog and see how the project is going. Thanks!