What happened to the last two weeks?

So, not too much happening on the hardware front these last couple of weeks. I got a new (small) antenna for the plane. Previously, we were using a piece of wire I ripped out of my old laptop, but I think that might have been causing problems, especially at long distances. So now, there's a cool little antenna sticking out of the plane right by the GPS receiver.

The bulk of the last couple weeks has been spent working on software. The screenshots here are from the latest version of our homemade cockpit app. This runs on my laptop when we're flying and displays telemetry from the plane in real time. It can also save logs of the flights and plays them back later. The newest additions feature-wise are the Altimeter and the Heading Indicator instruments that show up on the bottom-right. If you're wondering, the units on the Altimeter are 1000/100/10 meters.

Here's a few screenshots. Take a look at the altitude in the last one -- 469 meters is a little more that 1,500 ft!

Test Sensors -- Round 2 -- Flight!

After a bit of work on the wireless link (which was causing some problems with the earlier flights), we went back out for a second day of test flights.

Here's a .kml file (Google Earth) showing the GPS track from the 5 test flights we did last Sunday. The altitude data has been included as well, so be sure to pan the view to see the vertical axis:
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Test Sensors - Results

So, the first flights of our sensor platform took place on Jan 23rd. This is a sample of the data we got back:

This is a graph showing basic telemetry data from the aircraft during a flight. The data is sent from the Arduino to the xbee radio, received by a ground station, logged, and then later processed with Excel. Of note, the pilot performed a low altitude pass at approximately 90 seconds into the recorded session, and the large spikes beginning around 110 seconds are from a vertical flip:

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