16 Sep

The problem of air leakage is a problem that every balloon has to face. We need to know and understand the air leakage situation of the blimp that we are going to use in the future. The following two pictures are situation of balloon in day 1 vs. day 28: I recorded some data in the past 28 day...

11 Sep

I have been working on brainstorming and prototyping different methods that enable the fleet of blimps the FORAY team is developing to corral a balloon and score it in the appropriate goal. Some factors I need to take into consideration includes the weight of the mechanism, whether we want a passive...

10 Sep

We designed a reconfigurable gondola and motor beam that could allow us to test different thrust configuration efficiently. Here are two examples: The different configuration that we would like to test: (The following figures are all top view) The research questions that we want...

09 Sep

I determined the change in the signal strength of the network due to metal interference. I used the same setup as the previous experiment. Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) was used as a metric to measure signal strength. ESP32 WIFI (2.4 GHz) A point to point connection was established u...

09 Sep

I've integrated all the components and tested the manual control. The necessary components for manual control are: Control board: NodeMCU Motor driver: tb6612fln Motor + 55mm propeller 1000 mAh 3.7v Li-po battery This hardware configuration allows the blimp to perform these operations...

02 Sep

Motivation The objective of the experiments was to test various communication methods (different protocols and frequency) under different conditions. I am using the following communication devices – ESP32 Wifi Module – 2.4GHz ESP32 Bluetooth Low Energy – 2.4 GHz NRF24L01 module - 2.4GHz Lo...

02 Sep

I have been working on taking power consumption measurements of the arduino nano control board, as well as the motors and wireless receivers. Unfortunately, Amazon had some problems with delivery and I was unable to receive the current reading board and the motor driver this week. I was planning on...

01 Sep

During the blimp WIFI manual control experiment, I noticed some interesting phenomena. Even the following experiments are just some failure examples, I still can learn something from it. Failure experiment 1: The reason the balloon hit the wall was because human operational mistakes. When you...

30 Aug

Motivation – The Arduino IDE can only be used to monitor a single port. Arduino IDE does not allow multiple serial ports to be monitored simultaneously. Serial library can be used to read, write and print to different serial ports. Therefore, different ports can be monitored simultaneously from the...

30 Aug

To calculate the volume of helium required for neutral buoyancy based on the mass of components and blimp. Assumptions – Temperature is constant. The gas is purely helium The density of surrounding air is constant Atmospheric pressure is constant Derivations Using the equation - ...