My initial test of the different blimp envelope shapes resulted in the other balloons that I had bought not having a large enough volume of helium to support the weight of the flapping technology that is needed to enable them to traverse space. This was also true in the case that all 3 small balloon...

I built a prototype version that attached motor propellers on to the clownfish balloon. This experiment is gain more intuition on making the gondola, and testing the speed of clownfish balloon that uses propellers. The experiment set up: Environment Temperature: 21°c Testing space: Length 138...

I tested the wireless control of the motors. As long as the raspberry pi zero w is under the same wifi network as of my computer, we can wirelessly control the motors. Your browser does not support the video tag. The gondola is also a simple version using pla to print. The weight of it is 8g.

For testing this week, I used the Air Swimmer blimp and made different modifications to it. My end goal was to determine whether propellers or using a flapping motion was a more effective way of providing thrust for our balloon. First, I did some basic flight tests to see how well it moved around...

The past few days, I have worked on implementing a pre-built flapping technology on helium balloons of different shapes and sizes running tests with them. Although the experiment did not go as planned (for reasons I will discuss later), I will discuss what did occur as I ran my first iteration of th...

Finished the experiment of using bluetooth and wifi to remotely control two motors. Bluetooth + cellphone app: Wifi + cellphone app:

This past week, I have been researching different camera modules that can be used on the blimps in the FORAY project. The main challenge when it comes to determining the best camera module for our use case is choosing one that is a light as possible without sacrificing performance capability in term...

Foray Blimp Becoming Mobile Big Picture In order to build the optimal blimp for competition, we are currently focusing on modeling the different parts of the blimp’s movement. Specifically, movement in the horizontal plane and altitude control. In terms of horizontal plane movement, we are seekin...

This summer I am working with other members of LEMUR on the FORAY project where we are developing a fleet of LTAVs (lighter-than-air vehicles) with a design emphasis on speed and agility that can compete in a game of aerial soccer or Quidditch. Below is the overal structure of the different aspect...