Wednesday, March 14, 2012

KO7M goes multi-propeller

Well, I have gone to multiple propellers.  Good thing I have a multi-engine rating

I have been working on implementing satellite tracking algorithms (SGP4) on the propeller device as previously posted.  I now have a new propeller board that I will be using to drive az/el servos to move an antenna in sync with a satellite pass.  This little board can be used drive up to 16 servo motors.  If you need more than this, you can daisy-chain two of them together and control up to 32 servos.  (I foresee an atonomous flying vehicle in my future, but that is another post for another day...)


I am working with small hobby servos that are capable of moving up to 8 lb of antenna hardware.  The pan mount can take 150 lb on top of the mount and 200 lb of side load at the shaft.  The tilt mount can handle 8 lb of load.


This is sufficient for my small arrow antenna which is only 20 oz and is giving me some experience in driving servo motors.  I could also velcro my solar panel array to it and have it track the sun to recharge my batteries whilst operating off the grid.  The pan mount can rotate up to 450 degrees while the tilt mount can rotate 135 degrees.  So, this should be fun for some garden experiments with satellites as well as making a fun pan/tilt camera mount.

Future projects of course will scale this up to handle large antenna arrays.

2 comments:

  1. A nagy méretű alumínium fogaskereket hol szerezted be?

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