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It flies, now what?

A project log for Remote Control Mini Blimp!

Mini blimp flies through hoops! Features 3 DC motors/ propellers, battery charging, and wireless communication.

sophi-kravitzSophi Kravitz 04/23/2018 at 02:364 Comments

I'm pretty excited. The blimp flies and is as controllable as a large envelope full of helium in a drafty house can be ;)

The blimp shown here is 24" diameter, 8" high.

So what's different about this revision and why does it fly?

Gotchas

I had a memory leak in which the ram was spinning down and causing the connection to drop. Turns out the libraries (2.4.1) provided for ESP8266WiFi have a bug. A down rev (2.4.0) fixed that problem, but it still took me a day to figure it out.

Still todos

I found these docs helpful

ESP8266 Modes + configuring

ESP8266WiFi library definitions for Arduino

ESP8266 libraries on github

Discussions

davedarko wrote 04/23/2018 at 09:00 point

yaaay :)

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deʃhipu wrote 04/23/2018 at 07:16 point

Congratulations!

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Ted Yapo wrote 04/23/2018 at 04:33 point

Very cool!

If you turn the magnets sideways, you may find that your blimp has a preferred orientation: it will act as a compass and point north-south.  I thought at one point about a making blimp with a magnetorquer like this - turn the magnet with a motor and wait for the ship to come about.

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oshpark wrote 04/23/2018 at 03:20 point

Exciting update!

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