Saturday, July 3, 2021

Rebus


This is the second fitment of the battery-packs I tried yesterday but at five I decided it looked like a dog's dinner and watched the Euro 2020 soccer tournament instead.

And on top of all of this ~ quite literally ~ Monty's seat still has to go.

I'd reclaimed the avionics suite that we used on a previous eight-motored prototype and parked it at the front, more or less as was. It was a revelation to me that the FCC or flight control computer need not be dead centre, though any place else is of course likely to be sub-optimal. This hurts, as I regard my prototype as about as optimal as people-carrying quadcopters get.

Behind that board are two 22.2v packs that will have to be bussed together in series to double the voltage, prior to connection to the power distribution board (PDB) at the back, where it looks much like a dead jellyfish.

It's what in the airline industry we would have called the Battery Bus, and ideally I had wanted it fixed centrally ~ underneath if necessary ~ so that the run to each motor was around the same length, and therefore voltage.

(Lost to us from school physics is the fact voltage drops over quite short distances, which means our electric hedge-trimmers die at the far end of the garden. This is bad enough, but for Edison it meant that Tesla would build the modern world instead.)

It's a 'back to the drawing board' moment... or in my case, to the back of the envelope.