After an initial checkout of my recently built EasyStar RC airplane on Friday by Erik at LASP, I took it out Saturday morning near my house for my initial flight. The November day could not have been nicer- 60’s, sunny, and very little wind. I wound up flying for nearly an hour on a single charge of the 1500 mAh LiPO battery, which encompassed 6 flights and only one minor crash 🙂 Because of the low weight of the LiPO battery, I added my Garmin Forerunner 305 watch into the cockpit as ballast and got some fantastic flight paths recorded! It took two small tricks to make this really useful. First, the GPS watch had to be set to record data every second in order to wind up with smooth flight paths. And second, in order to maintain the measured altitude, the Activity Option to use MB Gravity Elevation Correction had to be disabled in MotionBased prior to exporting the KML file. However once I did this, I was blown away with the flight paths that this little runners’ GPS watch was able to record!
Take a look at this playback animation of my last flight which consisted primarily of unpowered gliding high above the ground. Be sure to choose Satellite and Large within the Google map frame, select the playback speed to be 0.5x or 1.0 x, and hit the Play button! Pretty darn cool!
Assuming that you have Google Earth (and you should), take a look at this 3D flight path. Now I want to figure out how to use the built-in flight simulator to fly the recorded flight path!A more thorough posting that relates to autonomous RC airplanes is over at DIY Drones.