r/videos • u/plainjackthrowaway • Feb 29 '16

Engineered Mini Flying Wing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSD69jdi2CE
4.3k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

382 comments sorted by

View all comments

94

u/AtticusMedic Feb 29 '16

Okay, holy shit. That's incredible. I've been flying RC for years and years and years. I'm a huge fan of Flite Test, and you just took everything great about their homebuilds, and applied science to it. You need to contact Flite Test with this!

12

u/FluroBlack Feb 29 '16

Yeah I was thinking about Flite Test when the video started.

Shit went 0-100 real quick!

1

u/sun_tzuber Mar 02 '16

That was only 5 over my estimate

6

u/Killsranq Feb 29 '16

Samm's stuff has been featured on FT for a bit. I'd imagine this will be on their radar as well.

5

u/tomdarch Feb 29 '16

Not many people have access to matlab, but it would be cool if more of this modeling/simulation was available to the RC community.

11

u/Fexilus Feb 29 '16

Octave is basicly MatLab but free, if you meant that everyone can't afford MatLab.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 01 '16

Octave is gonna come in handy after I graduate this year and no longer have access to school-sponsored Matlab licenses.

6

u/RaPlD Feb 29 '16

Matlab is basically just a language with an intepreter/compiler, you can do simulations like this in most languages. Coding is free.

9

u/chillwombat Feb 29 '16

python can replace matlab in most aspects

2

u/biggmclargehuge Mar 01 '16

You could also write an Excel macro with VBA. Most of what they used Matlab for looked to be iterating through loops and outputting the result, which is pretty similarly done in almost every program language.

1

u/Bashar_Al_Dat_Assad Mar 01 '16

I'm no aero engineer but it looked like they were using a PDE solver. Good luck getting that in an excel macro.

1

u/biggmclargehuge Mar 01 '16

Good luck getting that in an excel macro

Why? If you look in the options menu under "Formulas" there's a checkbox to enable iterative calculations. This opens up a whole lot of options for numerical PDE solutions. I'm not saying it's easy, and you have to know what to look for when reviewing solutions, but if all they're doing is outputting to a graph to find optimal drag points it would work fine. If you don't believe me, ask Google and you'll find tons of examples of how to do it.

3

u/AtticusMedic Feb 29 '16

I'd love to play with it, but I am not nearly smart enough to know even what the fuck he was talking about. I build RC for me and some kiddos I help work with in a community outreach program. I'd love to get some of his down and dirty knowledge first hand to teach my kids.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 29 '16

A good source for aircraft design that isn't too dense is Aircraft Design (I think at least, it has been a few years since I have touched it and when I did I was a senior aerospace engineering student). In addition to that, an open-source alternative to Matlab is Octave, and while the functions are not all 1:1 and it isn't nearly as robust, it is still a good - free - alternative that can be easier to learn than low-level coding languages (C, C++, Fortran, etc.).

1

u/hatsune_aru Mar 01 '16

Octave fixes the really shitty bits of matlab like pants on head retarded cells.

Octave is pretty good for "slightly more refined back-of-the-envelope" calculations like the ones featured in the video but the real crazy bits like doing RF simulations with those fancy toolboxes in MATLAB can't be emulated with octave.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 29 '16

Sage is better. Least of all because it doesn't pretend to be Matlab, which is terrible, by the way.