The UAV
November 5th, 2006 by 
lorne
I think it’s time to introduce another project I’ve been working on. One day, near the start of summer ‘05, I was hanging out with my friend Colin. He’s a mechanical engineer, and I’m a computer scientist so we tend to talk about some pretty nerdy stuff. Trying to break our boredom, he hit upon the idea of building an RC plane. This sounded fun, but just wasn’t high-tech enough for me. People have been flying RC planes since the 1950’s… big deal. A UAV though! Now THAT would take our project into the 21st century.
And so the project was born. The goal: to build and fly a UAV. Sure you can buy them ready-to-fly, but for $4000 who can afford it? Hobbies are supposed to be about wasting your time, not your money… and has this one ever. It will soon be 2 years since we sat by his pool, tossing around ideas, and it still isn’t finished.
The last 19 months have been a strange journey: diving head-long into things I knew nothing about, accumulating a strange assortment of electronics on my desk (now workbench), and learning that there’s a kind of “art” to programming under-powered microcontrollers.
I’ll see if I can summarize the project’s “troubled” history in my next post.
