Week 8, May 19-25

This week the team worked together on testing the plane.  There were numerous attempts to get it off of the ground and hold it in a hover, but there was little success.  It seems that the problem is composed of several things. First, not all of the gyros were originally used.  In the first video, one can see the plane kind of rolling and not keeping a stable hover.  Secondly,  the controls for the plane were reversed and inverted, as to say the aileron control was controlled with the left joystick, and the yaw was controlled with the right stick and reversed.  The reason for this is because the chip that is being used only allows for one mode of flight, so when the physical body of the plane switches from when method of flight to another, the flight controls are reversed.  Originally the controls were set up to be normal for helicopter mode and reversed for plane mode, but seeing as it is almost impossible to fly a helicopter with reversed controls, the team switched them.  So for the second video, the controls are set up in a way that the airplane controls are reversed and the helicopter controls are normal.   These problems were fixed and the second video presents a better hover.  The second video shows the plane nose dive.  This is caused by the battery having not been properly held down to the plane, so it slid to the front as the plane flew backwards.  The plane will be finalized and continued to be tested within the next week.