May 9, 2020

Using AI to Design a Wing Part One

If it is possible to transform a blob into a beautifully streamlined fuselage using AI, it is possible to design a wing too. That does not mean it is easier however; wings are a lot more delicate to design than a fuselage. We cannot just run our drag minimizing scripts on the wings and expect them to not mess anything up. What We Need To Worry About There are two sets of things we need to worry about.

May 2, 2020

Composite Aircraft Building Materials and Methods

Before we proceed to designing the wings of the Kontor, there are yet more questions to answer. Last week we determined what will power the aircraft. Today we will look at what the airframe will consist of. Disclaimer: I have never built anything out of composite materials, nor have I ever talked to an experienced person in the field. All I present here is data I found on the internet (mostly the eea.

Apr 12, 2020

Electric Powerplant for a Motorglider

Let’s change subjects from all the AI stuff. We need to decide what the airplane will have as a powerplant, so we can estimate where the centre of mass will be, so we can design the wings and the tail. But before we pick a battery, motor, and propeller, we need to answer the all time question: Single Seat or Tandem Seats? So far we’ve just been using a dummy 3d person for reference to design the fuselage.

Apr 4, 2020

Using Ai to Optimize a Fuselage Part Two

Two weeks A long time ago we saw how to optimize a fuselage’s cross-sectional area using OpenVSP as a heuristic. The point of this exercise was to see if we could design the most basic optimization algorithm. The outcome of the exercise was easy to predict; as an object’s cross-sectional area reduces, so does its drag coefficient. So we wrote a simple 1 dimensional hill climb algorithm, that decreased its stepping distance as time ran out.

Feb 16, 2020

Using AI to Optimize A Fuselage Part One

Two weeks ago we went over how to compile OpenVSP from scratch so we could get access to its python API. I spent the last two weeks messing around with the API, so we could now start a more interesting subject. Let’s see if we can optimize the current design using a bit of artificial intelligence. To be more specific, let’s look at the fuselage pieces on this commit of the design.

Feb 2, 2020

How to Compile Openvsp Python Api

So you want to get dirty with OpenVSP? That’s pretty ambitious. Being able to modify your models programatically can be very useful when using scripting methods. However, this is also not as easy as I thought it would be… so I decided to make a post about it. Let’s go over the steps I went through to get OpenVSP accessible to your python scripts. Note: I did this on a UNIX based OS, so it probably won’t help Windows users.

Jan 19, 2020

Using Git Version Control to Design An Airplane

For those familiar with git and version control methodologies, the answer is immediately yes. But that’s not entirely obvious to those who aren’t. Git is a tool developed by Linus Torvalds, with the intention of saving, sharing and organizing the Linux kernel. See the wikipedia page for that. There are other similar tools that achieve similar goals, but they aren’t as popular as git. One of the goals of the kontor project is to make use of git methodologies to save, share and organize the design of the kontor, the purpose of which is to avoid confusion down the line.

Jan 12, 2020

Hello World

Hi. This is the first blog post in a series documenting the conception, prototyping, and construction of the world’s first open source electric motorglider. To start, let me first introduce myself, and the project. Who Am I I am a physics and computer science graduate for the university of Prince Edward Island (Canada). I was born in Ecuador, and grew up in Brazil. I’m also an airplane nerd, and have my private pilot’s license.