Week 2 Journal

Finding an arduino project that is appealing to me was difficult because I wanted to find a project that was fun to me and useful to make. The project that I researched is the Arduino quadrotor helicopter. It’s an RC helicopter that uses four rotors. When one rotor spins faster than the rotor on the opposing side, the faster side will have more lift, and thus the helicopter will tilt. When the helicopter is tilted, the air is being blown slightly sideways instead of directly down, and the helicopter will move.

The propellers also need to be in counter-rotating pairs, two spin clockwise and two spin counter-clockwise. This way, the helicopter does not spin on the vertical axis since the rotational enertia is cancelled out. But when the pair that’s spinning in one direction is faster than the other pair, the helicopter will spin on the vertical axis. This is how the helicopter controls its direction.

The makers of the helicopter will be building a flight controller circuit that contains an accelerometer and gyroscope sensor so that a microcontroller can detect undesired changes in the helicopter’s angle, and adjust each rotor’s speed accordingly to counter the variation. This microcontroller will do this hundreds of times per second, keeping the helicopter stable in the air.

The flight controller is a completely open source circuit.  The flight controller is completely Arduino compatible. The source code is a modified version of AeroQuad (open source Arduino based quadrocopter control code). The flight characteristics can be adjusted using AeroQuad’s configurator utility.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2TbSajX8-M

*all info found on http://www.instructables.com/id/RC-Quadrotor-Helicopter/