The Eye in the Sky

After the successful launch of the ‘Wolverhampton Eye in the Sky’- BLIMP at the Gadget Show Live 2010; budding Aviator and final year BSc Computer Science student Ed Wilson has been working hard to develop an improved version which was demonstrated at this year’s NMBS Exhibition on 25th May 2011 at the Telford International Centre.

The BLIMP is a console controlled airship. The 2011 version has been vastly improved with a closed loop feedback system, which helps control the ships motion and an exaggerated control system which demonstrates how the sensors work in the airship.

Visitors to the exhibition had the opportunity to fly the airship, using the new bespoke games console controller, which tells the airship which direction to travel in. A series of sensors onboard detect the direction, and put measures in place to correct the path should it start to go off course. 

Technically the ship is more efficient due the more powerful 8MHz processor, which reduces power consumption. The control system takes input from the 3D accelerator and 2D gyroscope, giving it 5 degrees of freedom. These sensors are used in an inertial measurement unit, implemented on Arduino[1], that allows it to calculate the ship’s position, speed and acceleration. The sensors include an accelerometer and a gyroscope, which change the output of the motor to change the direction.  The ship makes use of industry standard wireless communication techniques, ZigBee[2], which have improved its reliability from the model last year.

[1] http://www.arduino.cc/ - An open source prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee - A specification for a suite of high level communication protocols using small, low-power digital radios on an IEEE 802 standard for personal area networks.