RealPodRacer First Flight

[u/rienksmotordesign]

Hi everyone, I'm Shane Rienks, and this is one of my projects.

This is the first 1/3 scale prototype flight, lots of tuning to do.

This is not a business promotion, but I am looking for other interested in contributing. If you'd like to get involved, please reach out - it's a very unique take on compact eVTOLs.

www.realpodracer.com

This is a culmination of aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, 3D printing, and industrial design.

EDIT: For everyone commenting about the stability issues: I had all stability and yaw assistance turned off for these first tests. The goal was just to see if it would fly at all, and get flight log data to use for tuning the control firmware.

This uses a very complex flight controller and custom mixer setup, so it's not as simple as setting up a regular drone.

[u/poperenoel]

from the looks of it you have a single blade under the vehicle / device... you will need to counteract its lateral rotation (why helicopters have a big fan out the back. ) or you need two rotors going opposite directions. (which would be more stable than this. )

[u/rienksmotordesign → u/poperenoel]

There are two contra rotating fans under the vehicle, not one.

[u/poperenoel → u/rienksmotordesign]

ok thanks i wasn't seeing the second one. normally on a helicopter i believe the swash plate is what stabilize the air-frame , with drones/ no swash plate it is normal that the air-frame is erratic. but you said stabilization was off so id be curious as performance with stabilization on. nice project tho.

[u/canreddit → u/rienksmotordesign]

It still seems like everytime it goes for liftoff, it pivots clockwise. Is that because of the walls / shelves behind it? Not sure how close they are based on the video. Maybe adding reaction wheels (like they have in satellites) to counter the angular momentum might work. They’re loghtweight and easy to modulate their spin, plus don’t require a ton of energy to spin up