It flew !!!!!

Nice still day and so i decided that it was time to stand up and throw the plane.
Standing in the yard out the front of my house, crouched down and full of dread as to what will happen in a few short moments from now.
I throw...
Time stands still as I watch the glider sail off wondering what it will be like when it lands or just crashes.
Slowly it banks right and the wing tip touches the ground.
All is good.
Its in one piece.

6.5:1.5 glide slope. If it didn't bank it might have gone more :)

Happy day.

Next to the sand dunes to try a longer tet flight and balance the glider

At the airfield

So today started by taking the glider to a local airfield for some feedback on the design and I must say I learned a lot from Mitch Gibbs (I hope I got that right...)

The basic feed back was good and I am now encouraged to move onto the next stage after I make some minor adjustments.

1. Fix the nut keeper in the wing that fell out
2. relocate the usb hub as it stops the canopy from going into place
3. Fix the PCB for the wing controls as it failed to function correctly

Update:
All fixed now to go and throw it. Maybe in the front yard first

Charger connection

For a while now I have been pondering how to to charge the twin 12 volt batteries from a single 12 volt supply.
It sounds simple enough, but my issue was that I need to supply 24 volts to the flight avionics for everything to work correctly.

The solution was simple.

A 4 pole 12v relay.

In its de-energised state it supplies 24 volts with both batteries in series. When the charger plugs in it supply 12 to switch on the relay that in turns places the batteries in parallel and supplies the 12 volt charger to them.

Now with the charge circuit working i am off to a local model air field that has a lot of old timer glider enthusiests to see what they say before my first flight tests in a few weeks :)

The start of the avionics and vison computer systems

So it started out as balancing the plane. Testing showed that it required around 1.2Kg of weight in the front of the wings to get it nearly correct. Initially I had a single 12v Gel cell that was about right but latter found that due to its age it was failing under load. The solution was to get a pair of 12v 2A/h seal lead acid batteries. these cam in just under the required wight. 

That is ok as I need to setup a pair of switch mode PSU's. one for the servo control system and one for the on board computers driving the SSD and cameras. Initial static test are ok.

Soon the body will be done and the basic avionics will be in place for test flights.

Buildbot monitoring with check_mk

The following script is used on my buildmaster and report back the status and queue lengths for each individual builder.
Currently uses a script to process out the json response from the server so that it can be processed.

#!/bin/bash
url="http://localhost:8010/json"
json=`curl $url 2>/dev/null`
builder=`echo $json |json.sh |grep state |grep "^\[\"builder" |\grep "state\"\]" |awk -F"\"" '{print $4"="$8}'`
set -- `echo $builder`
for i in $*
do
        export `echo $i |cut -d= -f1`=`echo $i |cut -d= -f2`
done

builder_list=`echo $json |json.sh|grep state|grep "^\[\"builder" |\grep "state\"\]" |awk -F"\"" '{print $4}'`
for q in `echo $builder_list`
do
        builder_curl=`curl ${url}/builders/${q} 2>/dev/null`
        state=`echo $builder_curl|json.sh 2>&1 |grep "\"failed\",\"" |grep -v "\[\]" |grep -v "\[\]" |awk '{print $2}' |sed 's/\"//g' |sed 's/\[//g'|sed 's/\]//g'|sed 's/,/:/g'`
        pending=`curl ${url}/builders/${q} 2>/dev/null |json.sh 2>&1 |grep pendingBuilds |sed '/\[\]/ d'|awk '{print $2}'`
        current_step=`curl ${url}/builders/${q}/builds/-1 2>/dev/null|json.sh -l 2>&1|grep  "\"currentStep\",\"text\",0" |awk '{print $2}' |tr -d [\'\"]`
        export $q="${!q},$pending,$state,$current_step"

done

for q in `echo $builder_list`
do
        state=`echo ${!q} |grep failed |wc -l`
        status=`echo ${!q} |cut -d, -f1`
        step=""
        queue="0"
        current="0"
        if [ $state -ne 0 ]
        then
                STATE="WARNING"
                STATUS="1"
                MSG=`echo ${!q} Failed|awk -F"failed:" '{print $2}'`
        else
                STATE="Idle"
                STATUS="0"
                MSG=""
        fi
        if [ $status == "offline" ]
        then
                STATE="Slave Offline"
                STATUS="3"
                MSG=""
        elif [ $status == "building" ]
        then
                build_step=`echo ${!q} |cut -d, -f4`
                STATE="Building"
                current="1"
                queue=`echo ${!q} |cut -d, -f2`
                MSG="$MSG builder queue has $queue jobs waiting. Current build step $build_step"
        fi
        echo -e "$STATUS Pulse_$q ${q}=$current|${q}_queue=$queue $STATE $MSG"
done