My friend Matthew and I decided to start working on a new project, an RC bomber plane. The plan is that the bomb bay could fit objects like sandwiches and hotdogs (no actual bombs of course). Matthew and I worked together in a group for the Advanced Energy Vehicle which will make working together quite easy.

Matthew owns 2 EDF (electric ducted fan) motors which will allow us to create a large plane. While I would like to sit here and act like I know about aerospace engineering, Matthew is an aerospace engineer and knows much more than I do about aerodynamics, thrust, and all the calculations that go along with making a plane fly well. Basically, I’m leaving the calculations of the plane body to him.

I started work on the communication between the remote and the plane. The picture above shows my Arduino nano 33 BLE and my Arduino Mega Rev3 connected to HC-12s. However, I should have read more into the nano 33 BLE because they do not have the SoftwareSerial library which is needed for HC-12 communication. This means that the circuit above does nothing. I did some research into transmitters and I have decided to just go with an RF24 radio transmitter. Even though they are larger, they transmit way faster. In addition, the SoftwareSerial library halts Arduino sketches with interrupts which would make the planes controls less responsive.

The current plan is to use the Arduino Mega as the board on the plane. The reason for this is that the mega has a fast chip and many IO pins for all the motors and sensors that will be on the plane. The only downside is that an Arduino Mega is about 37 grams compared to an Uno’s 25 or so grams. Personally I believe this is not a bad trade-off at all.