Accelerometer and airdata comparison flight on N291DR

Today I did a quick (0.6 hour) flight on N291DR to compare accelerometer data with the airdata probe. The idea is to see if the angle of yaw measurement from the probe is consistent with "ball" coordination or whether it changes with airspeed / AoA / .... The setup involved a data logging laptop strapped in with the seat belt into the passenger seat:

The probe itself should surprise no follow of this blog but it was on the pax side this time, to be closer to our receiver:

As for the accelerometer, this was an interesting challenge. :) I had a SparkFun ADXL 345 breakout board requiring I2C or SPI connections. I found an I2C to USB adapter I could use with my PC. However -- that requires knowing all the setup of the ADXL 345 chip and writing a "driver" for it from scratch. Meanwhile there's already a driver library written by SparkFun ... but it is for the Arduino. Perversely, therefore, the "easiest" way to get data out of the thing was to run a tiny program using the SparkFun library on an Arduino, and send the data via the Arduino's serial to USB connection to the PC. This is the accelerometer board, clipped to the glareshield in the center of the airplane:

Bonus points, I say, for finding a way to include an actual breadboard and jumper wires on the "avionics" of a flying aircraft. :)

For the wireless connection, I used a simple USB adapter to the XBee module, and clipped it to the glareshield:

We have a total of 1 hour of logged data, where the actual Hobbs time on the flight was 0.6 hours, and the actual flying time somewhat shorter. We will be crunching through this and reporting back. Meanwhile enjoy the pictures of the pretty Airball test ship:

First flights on N291DR

Yesterday I flew our first flights on our new test ship, N291DR. We are already geared up to mount on a RANS S-6S so it was pretty easy. Here are some pictures of the setup:

We need a better place to mount the display -- we have a RAM mount on the upper framework but that's hard to see. In any case, though, we did make a few important observations:

1. Basic operation of the probe is good.
2. Our altitude math is totally off. Need to figure out what's up.
3. The air was quite turbulent and the ball jiggled a lot; maybe we need some filtering after all.
4. For some reason, the wireless connection kept cutting out.

I was doing takeoff and landing practice, and using my store-bought ASI as my primary reference but every once in a while peeking out of the corner of my eye. From that quick observation, it does appear like the AoA and yaw information is pretty useful and sensitive and I could, if I wanted (and if the system were more reliable, and mounted more in my field of view) fly using it.

I'll be trying to fix our altitude math and then doing some post-analysis of the data in the coming days.