brains...BRainS...and CIRCUITS!

Last night I began soldering together the tiny arduino clones know as dorkboards that will be the brains of our roblimp. Boy these things are small! This was my first experience with surface mount soldering and to my surprise I pulled it off.

My brother and I also had a fun weekend session where we were able to take control over our motors, servo and the first of our instruments, a compas. this project is coming along really quickly, and in no time we should have something airborne!

solder of fortune

I have finally embarked on a project that I've been talking about for years. Namely building my own airship. Considering the expense of the full sized model, I decided to start with something a bit smaller and, perhaps autonomous. I shared the idea with my brother Ron Evans (http://deadprogrammersociety.blogspot.com/), a very talented programmer, and we began talking about arduino, and the ruby arduino development(RAD) project and thus, project flying robot was born.

The idea is to build a semi autonomous blimp, capable of receiving instruction from an xbee equipped laptop, and use on board sensors to navigate around obstacles.

I have a back ground in building electric vehicles so the responsibility for building the body of the blimp has fallen to me, leaving my brother to work on the brain. I realize that for a first project, a flying robot is pretty ambitious, but when it comes to things like this, I like to get in over my head right away, and see what happens.