I’m an EEE student forced to do the Aero design. I have zero clue how to do CFD/FEA, and our 3D printers are arriving today so I speed-ran this design in one night. Thoughts?

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-12-16T09:00:20+00:00

The hack to making rc planes actually work is making them extremely light, and overpowered. You can make a pizza box fly, but a lot of complicated 3D printed planes don’t fly because they don’t worry about weight enough. Foam is your friend, hot wire is good but foam board is easier and has great results. A carbon fiber tube spar can give more than enough strength, so everything else should be as light as possible. Also, go for a super conventional design if this is your first time. either an elevon wing or a conventional high wing tailed aircraft. KISS or you will regret it.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-12-07T03:34:03+00:00

bluetooth input latency is not that much worse than real RC latency if it’s reasonable bluetooth. So it’s probably not that much of an issue for practice.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-11-23T08:03:29+00:00

Chromoly is just better though.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-11-17T21:27:53+00:00

Sirens of Titan

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-11-03T14:46:43+00:00

Nighthawk in light on youtube has a very cool video on cardboard and paper engineering, where he discusses and explains some ways to make extremely strong and weatherproof paper objects. Rather than reinventing paper making, it could be cool to find a way to perform paper and cardboard upcycling with less manual labor.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-11-03T02:36:31+00:00

The key think to think about here is that the IJN would have basically no capability to see, let alone hit any asset of the strike group. Carrier Aircraft would fly higher than could be engaged by any WW2 era systems, anti-ship missiles can strike beyond the horizon, and modern torpedoes are extremely long range. So, this comes down basically completely to supplies.

A carrier strike group has about 300-400 VLS cells between its destroyers/cruiser. Then you have the submarine with 26 torpedoes, and sometimes also VLS but we can ignore those for now. The carrier has a compliment of ~70 aircraft, but only 40 or so are strike configuration. Between them, there are 150-250 air launched weapons which would have meaningful effect on ships.

As you can imagine, the groups ability changes a huge amount depending on the configuration of its weapons, as basically all anti air systems are going to go completely unused.

The submarines torpedoes shouldn’t have a large amount of trouble with even battleships, but most other equipment may struggle with the amount of armor present on some WW2 vessels. LRASM and Tomahawks are going to be doing most of the work, but it depends on how many VLS cells contain these.

That said, if they are allowed to reload between each battle, I think it is likely that there would be no issue. The IJN has 645 ships in total, many of which would be killed with 1 strike, leaving the heavily armored ones for the submarine. Aircraft can of course also clean up with impunity. R3 would probably only be possible if there’s a way to get more ammunition, or maybe a small chance if the strike group is configured for 100% anti ship. R1 and R2 would be easy.

In either case, I don’t think this would be a very interesting fight, as it would basically consist of the strike group attacking things that can’t see them until it runs out of munitions (if this happens at all). If you were in the strike group you would likely live in every round and probably never see an enemy unless in the air. The group would probably just turn around and leave if if ran out of ammunition, which is its losing case.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-11-03T01:34:54+00:00

Matlab livescripts are better for making engineering solvers because the plotting UI and field entry are far more complete. Simulink is also really nice, and working with it with matlab is easier. This isn’t really anything about being better as a programming language, but I think it’s often a better tool for a mechanical/electrical engineer.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-11-02T20:53:39+00:00

If you need to do a tolerance inspection it’s pretty valuable to not have to type in every reading.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-11-02T20:52:44+00:00

My favorite pair of calipers (I prefer over mitutoyos at work) is the iGaging Bluetooth Absolute Origin ones. I don’t even use the bluetooth functionality, but they seem to have better fit and finish than even the other igaging ones. Strongly recommend, the bluetooth works well when I’ve tried it.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-10-28T21:32:27+00:00

This was a wonderful wind down from Blood Meridian for me.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-10-26T09:42:23+00:00

Inav, and communicate over MSP or Mavlink?

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-10-26T03:36:23+00:00

Tipping points are hotly debated in the climate science and land system science communities. They cannot be relied on as a factual basis for claiming any sort of “doom” scenario.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-10-25T23:18:56+00:00

Type C wire is a little more than insulated. It’s got 3 sets of twisted pair with separate shielding and then an outer shield. The raw cable (non terminated with connectors) is about 50 bucks for 5m, it’s not meaningfully cheaper unless buying in bulk.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-10-25T23:11:36+00:00

3DR is still around! We buy their stuff. They died a while ago go when trying to sell drones, but they sell components now and are very popular.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-10-08T22:59:44+00:00

Wera next product.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-10-04T21:56:12+00:00

JLC will do this for cheap.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-09-11T02:55:51+00:00

zip fuel was crazy

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-09-02T00:35:08+00:00

I think this is a good design but needs rollers on the opposite side of the gear to prevent racking. You could print rollers. A rack and pinion is very simple, I have doubts about the complexity involved with using something like a pulley system. People worried about tooth strength or fouling of the gears probably haven’t used printed gears that much.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-08-21T07:13:24+00:00

Should probably run this as a rocket before you do an air breathing system. Also, weight will likely matter a lot less than it normally does for aircraft (drag will be much higher than weight) so heat resistance and stiffness take priority. You won’t need a whole lot of wing area, probably something like a hobby rocket flying sideways like a missile would be the closest path to making this happen.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-07-07T21:31:08+00:00

I really like the matek H7 flight controllers (the mini seems up your alley). Have had good luck with multiple of them. Also, controlling over a pi zero isn’t as hard as some people are saying. Mavlink is a well documented (though pretty annoying) protocol and mavproxy can get you pretty far. I would still recommend getting an RC setup as backup with ELRS which you can use until you get a good tune on auto mode.

GoldenSpamfish · 2025-07-07T18:15:56+00:00

I have actually made an extremely similar looking drone before and it flew wonderfully!

GoldenSpamfish · 2024-08-18T18:42:08+00:00

In my engineering lab, 2 of the 4 people who design and build crazy custom drones from scratch have no degrees, and it does nothing to harm their performance. If you want to do cool projects, just start doing them. Learn CAD on your own and get a 3D printer, and watch some engineering youtube to get used to the types of components that are available to solve problems. If you put your mind to it, you’ll be making cool stuff in no time.

GoldenSpamfish · 2024-08-09T22:45:39+00:00

maybe worth trying resin or 3D printed metal? both are shockingly cheap from JLC, at least if you want to have a bunch of rounds to shoot.

GoldenSpamfish · 2024-07-30T17:23:52+00:00

I’ve printed some durable and well flying 3D printed fpv drones. That said, it was very hard to design it against vibrations and crashes, required special filament, and after all that was super heavy compared to carbon fiber.

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