Mr Watt Solar Plane

 

We bought a solar plane from Mr Watt more than a years ago but with Covid and other things we did not unbox it till today.   Below Teryn and Amoni are opening the box:

 


And out of the box but not ready to fly it looks like this.   It is really big.


When they did a test flight in Italy it looked like this:



Along with Covid part of the delay was we did not know of a place to fly it.  Anguilla's two large grass fields both have problems.  One is in town near the airport.  The other is under the approach path to the airport.     We had hoped to work out landing in a net and did fly a plane into a net on a couple occasions but were not happy with this idea.   Since then we have found a remote beach that seems a good place to fly from.   

Another problem was how to do the camera, energy storage, computer, and radio control in the rated 500 grams.  We did not know how to do this when we ordered the plane but expected we would at some point.   We have recently  figured out how to have the flight controller adjust the motor to keep the solar panel operating at the ideal voltage without the weight of an MPPT controller.   We have also figured out how to have the DJI FPV work with a flight controller.  So we can control it, get good video, and have a computer stabilizing the plane and even doing return to home in case of loss of radio.

We also just found a really nice supercapacitor for this plane and ordered it.  It is only 250 grams and keeps the total weight of our stuff under 500 grams.  It will probably be a month or two before it gets here.   Still, it won't be too much longer till we can really fly this plane.



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