RE: How High, How Fast and How Hard? Project to find out.

screamingtiger — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 04:54:18 GMT

I think I my be wrong to directly add the climb or dive rate to the horizontal velocity. I have to think it through though. The dive rate has a horizontal and vertical component. However the horizontal would already be accounted for in the horizontal calculation, since it resulted in a delta X and a Delta Y. The delta Z would be the absolute dive rate so I think I may be correct to directly add it after all.

In worse case I can ignore the Z component and simply use the x/y horizontal components, just knowing that I may be going faster than stated in a dive.

Perhaps on the interface I will show the horizontal speed, vert speed, and the combined.

BTW, calculating velocity is not difficult with a GPS. All you have to do is get the current lat and long, wait some time, and retrieve those values again.

The methods I have seen use arclength to calculate the distance between two GPS points, but honestly for the short distances I would travel in 1 second its not necessary and a simple Pythagoras would be suffice.

The reason arclenth is used is because the earth is curved.

When traveling in a large aircraft for many hours and thousands of miles, tracking location is more difficult. The magnetic declination changes, the earth rotates underneath you, not to mention the Coriolis force has a play in it. If you are traveling fast enough, you may even need to account for time dilation.

All I need is speed, which is the distance tavelled over the time it took to travel that distance.

Yes, planes may use a lot of computer power, but many navigation systems were developed in the 1970s. The Arduino 16MHZ probably rivals most air craft in computing power [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-8e89e1f2-282a-43c9-acc3-50215fb09601/contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16]

RE: How High, How Fast and How Hard? Project to find out.

screamingtiger — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 15:00:03 GMT

So I decided to add one more measurement to this device. A G meter. I have an extra accelerometer I haven't used so I want to show the MAX G forced experienced by the aircraft in flight.

I will be using the Microstack accelerometer as well.

Still wont use the baseboard though as it is designed to go on a PI which is way overkill for this project.

RE: How High, How Fast and How Hard? Project to find out.

DAB — Thu, 10 Sep 2015 18:21:10 GMT

It will be interesting to see if you can keep GPS lock while flying.

You might want to setup a ground station and then you differential GPS based upon what the aircraft receives.

You can get more accurate position data and better velocity information with respect to your base station.

DAB