Lakehopper 1 Design

Have a look at the notebooks for each iteration of Lakehopper 1’s design:

• Iteration 1: Aspect Ration

• Iteration 2: Weight and Airfoil

• Iteration 3: Propulsion

• Iteration 4: Propulsion Weight

• Iteration 5: FPV Weight

• Iteration 6: Stability

This iterative approach is inspired by Carlos Montalvo’s Aircraft Flight Mechanics.

Maiden Flight

Lakehopper 1 took its maiden flight on monday the 6th of September 2021. Unfortunately she only flew for about 3 seconds before crashing sideways and breaking her wing with a crack.

While I plan to write a full post-mortem some time in the future, in short: the flight controller was misconfigured and thought the plane was facing left, which caused the sharp bank to the right.

You can view the flight log in the Ardupilot UAV Log Viewer by loading v1-maiden-6-9-21.bin. The screenshot below shows the most important part of this log: the incorrect orientation as well as the flight controller’s incorrect roll and pitch measurements.