Welcome
Hello! I'm Walter Gordy, an EE major at University of New Mexico. I've started some engineering projects such as the microbot project and the UAV project. These projects have really driven me to learn more.
This site is for putting many of the projects I've done for fun and ideas I have. You can always email me, but I'm not great at responding right away. Especially when someone has feature requests. I also have a flickr page and a youtube page.
Simulated Wind Effects on Lightweight UAV - 2008
Project Objectives:- Simulate Aircraft Flight Characteristics
- Simulate Wind
- Simulate GPS location drift and introduced error
- Develop appropriate navigation functions to compensate for errors and deviations in the flight path
- Test scenarios that would be difficult to monitor in a real world test
- Develop new functionality without risking the aircraft
This project started by discovering the power of Atmel's 8-bit processors and playing with a simple demo board. I wrote code to control servos, process gps, and make calculations all with only 1k of ram. I moved on to writing code that ran on a pda and drove a remote control truck around a field using only gps. That system provided easy feedback for debugging and a user interface to view the course the truck would take. It led to the design and of a circuit board to shrink the size of the pda, gps, and servo controllers to fit onto a single board. As I have tested the system on a plane I noticed that nature has some variables that just take too much time to troubleshoot in the field. I created this applet to simulate the affects of wind and gps drift on my flight system. With any luck this will lead to better firmware that is more capable of adapting to an ever changing environment.
The applet below is an simulated ion trap. The simulation is dealing with macroscopic charged particles.The trap type is known as a Paul Trap. The ring and the electrodes are simulating an alternating current supply.
Click on the applet to re-insert a particle into the trap.
If the particle is inserted outside the trap it escapes. Just click near the center of the trap to insure its capture.
