Skip to main content

How I built a RC Hovercraft

Last weekend one of my friend came to me and told me about an HOVERCRAFT event, and I thought I will give it a try as I had never in my life built a RC Hovercraft. So we thought we will learn something while building and we started with just a top-view diagram my junior made it on a drawing sheet. We got two extremely power full brush less DC motor. We did not buy the motor for the hovercraft. we bought two motors to build a twin engine aircraft and thought we can use it for this purpose also. The motors were too power full, hence we had to maintain the power to 50% and max 60%. We encountered several problems like the air cussion was not proper. we had to come up with the perfect design by trial and error. first we used flex banners for air cussion. unfortunately the flex was a bit heavy for the aircraft. later we faced another problem once the hovercraft started to hover, it started to rotate because of the rotational force. then the new problem was the rudder we made was small. we were unable to extended the rudder size as the event rules require our crafts to be well within 50x50x50. later we figured out the solutions for all the problems. then the last problem was that ours was not a programmable RC. So it was difficult to control two motors with the RC. Finally it came to life and here is a clip of the hovercraft.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Switch debouncer using SR Latch

We use switch in our day to day life to switch ON/OFF a bulb or a fan or  any electrical devices. But when we use switches in digital circuits, we observe a phenomenon called bouncing. This occurs because, when we turn the switch, the mechanical parts vibrate. i.e It toggles between ON and OFF state for some time until the mechanical contact attain equilibrium. this vibrations are minute and are not at all noticeable in electrical circuit. where as in digital circuits, these vibrations create pulses. which are detected by circuits which results in an error.               In the above circuit, there is a switch connected to VCC. You can toggle it between terminal 'a' and terminal 'b'. which as a voltage drop of 'Va' and 'Vb' respectively. In digital circuits if you can observe, it takes a finite amount of time to toggle between terminal 'a' and 'b'. which might approximately take 15ns. Now let us consider the terminal is at 'a'. we

PIC 18F452 Programming: LED blinking using assembly

Here is the basic program you need to start off with when you learn to use a microcontroller. We are using the microchip family PIC microcontroller. Which stands for Peripheral Interface Controller, PIC 18F452 is a 40 pin 8-bit microcontroller with 32 KBytes flash, 1536 Bytes of RAM and 256 Bytes EEPROM. It also boasts 4 timers, and three external interrupt pins. Coming to our first program, We will be using MPLAB for Building this project. Create a new project and select MPASM Suite for compiling. After writing the program, Dont forget to add the linker file and the source file in the source window. The linker file for the PIC 18F452 can be found in the  C:\Program Files\Microchip\MPASM Suite\LKR. search for 18f452. In this program, the Bit RB0, toggles continuously with some delay. Connect an LED to The RB0 Pin, i.e Pin 33.connect a 330E resistor in series with the LED. PROGRAM #INCLUDE p18f452.INC; CONFIG WDT=OFF; disabling the watchdog timer ORG 0; Specifing the st

PIC Programming: making a port bits toggle using assembly

CIRCUIT: Program: #INCLUDE p18f452.INC ORG 0 CLRF TRISD  L1 SETF PORTD CALL DELAY CLRF PORTD CALL DELAY GOTO L1 DELAY MOVLW 0xff MOVWF 0x10 L2 DECF 0x10,F BNZ L2 RETURN END