Rambling #5 (thoughts on bots)

I was browsing Hackaday a little while ago, and I came across This homebrew guided rocket and it looked pretty cool. I have a few model rockets and appropriate engines for them, some micro servos, a micro magician microcontroler and a few one cell lipo batterys from some cheap RC helis. 9 and 10 DOF IMUs are cheap and so are single and 3 axis gyros on ebay, and after seing the results of their rocket, I think a gyro or 3 is deffinately necessary instead of an accelerometer, altho I might make use of one of those too (the micro magician has one on board) So I have, or can soon have all the parts necessary to try my hand at building one of those. My father has been encouraging me to try building things other than various takes on obsitical avoidance, and I think this could be cool. My rocket body is a bit smaller than the one they used, so I am contemplating straping on another two rocket engines to the base of my Mis(Guided)Sile to give me a bit more thrust, and either using rear-ejection parachutes, much like this:

or none at all, after all, this IS missile, and after having a look at their rocket after it's flight, I dont know how well it would survive even with a parachute...

I have also been thinking about building a propeller powered missile/airplane hybrid using a rear mounted brushless motor like This one swinging a large prop to give me huge amount of thrust, 4 oversized rear fins, sorta acting like really small wings, and probably four fins at the front for pich/yaw, much like the sidewinder

The difference with mine, is I will have 2 fins in the middle, linked together to give me roll control, thus enabling me to have only 3 servos on board (each controling two fins for each degree of freedom, simplifying control, and saving on weight) I think if I do some looking around I should be able to get a motor/esc/prop/battery combo that will give me better than 1.5 to 1 thrust to weight ratio for the whole thing, enabling me to have it take off vertically and fly for a bit longer than the estes rocket motors.

Also possibly coming down the pipe, project wise are:
1. fabbing up a better mounting bracket for Going Whole HOG, letting me take it to some higher speeds without worrying about it coming apart, and possibly automating the thing, which would make it my fastest obstical avoider to date (Lets see if those picaxes REALLY do run at 64Mhz...)

2. As my last post said, I got a new chassis for AutoSquared, so when I get some time, I will get it posted on LMR, right now all it does is avoid stuff, but with my compass and GPS in hand I hope to change that soon...

3. One of these:

Except in a blue PAPER! Origami shell. Not really sure if it will work, but it will be interesting weather it works or not. probably going to be just RC not a robot (someone find me a sensor capible of seeing thru blue paper, and I will make it autonomus....

4. The missiles I mentioned in this post hopefully....

5. Possibly that electric bike hub motor powered big outdoor robot (if that thing ever makes it into the real world I am totally mounting a laser sighted paintball gun or potato cannon on it. :)

6. A 2 DOF hexapod ( I have all the servos I need, and I do already have 2 and 4 legged bots under my belt, and now I need more legs.)

7. giving my quadcopter a new body, and a pan/tilt camera with live feed down to the ground. I will have a seperate tx/rx controling the pan/tilt so I can focus on flying and someone else can get some footage.

8. at some point I might finish up GPS (my other outdoor bot)


One last thing before I sign off, If you are an FBI agent or anything, and are adding me to your watch list because I mentioned making small missiles, do not worry about it, if they ever get made, I am not going to be doing anything devious with them, all they will ever amount to is a slightly stabilized/ angle holding projectiles, or funny looking RC airplanes. But feel free to keep dropping by, I appreciate the page views :)