Helicopter Swash Plate

Anyone have any ideas on how to create this complicated piece of helicopter? I’ve currently got a plate with three of the long bars that can pivot, bridged near the top by more of the long bars.

_________________________________ The “blades”
| | |
| | | The pivot rods
||____|___ The plate

I’ve been trying to solve this conundrum since before Christmas.
If there is nothing that can really work, then I’ll move on.
Thanks,
Matt

Can you show us a picture of the real plate on a helicopter?


That’s a simplified view, but what I’m trying to do is even more simple. I just want it to be able to pitch forward, backward, and sideways. I don’t need up and down.

I dont think you will be able to get the kind of control I think you want with VEX unless you make it very large, and then you wouldn’t have good control. If you’re trying to make a VEW helicopter I doubt it’ll work since VEX is quite heavy.

First thing that comes to mind is to use a couple of gears, the ones with holes in them for connecting things, and drill out the center holes so the shaft will spin freely even when the things are pitched. This means the holes will need to be about twice normal size I think. Beyond that, if you can use non-vex parts, you might look at getting a couple of round pieces of plastic, like maybe heavy plastic lids with lips on them. Cut one slightly smaller than the other so it fits inside the lip of the other. Then drill holes through the center and connect your rods.

Enjoy,

Ray Moore

Get Moose and Squirrel

I had also thought about making an autonomous helicoptor. Let me know how it turns out. Hey can those GPS modules I’ve seen on the net work with vex? That would be excellent for this project!

I think building an actual working helo out of vex would be next to impossible due to the weight and lack of power. As for the GPS units, they have a simple serial interface and protocol so most likely you could program the vex to work with them. Check out sparkfun.com for gps units. They are a big PIC microcontroller shop so I bet they have PIC source code for working with GPS.

Enjoy,

Ray Moore

Get Moose and Squirrel!

The weight of the Vex battery alone would make any attempt of a Vex helicopter extremely difficult (and more likely impossible).

With proven heli blades and plenty of speed it could work but will it have a tail blade or counter-rotating blades? Before we talk autonomous which is not going to be easy and GPS lets get something that flies OK?

I had already decided to use a seperate spinning tail motor/rotor with two of the motors providing power to the main rotor which would have pre-made blades.
I’m giong to shelve this project for now until I can figure out the swash plate. Once I can get that to work like it should, the rest is easy squeezy.

What can’t you figure out? I have an r/c helicopter and I will take a picture but until then whats wrong?

A good chunk of the problem is that I only have one servo and can’t get the full, up, down, left, right, forward, backwards movement needed in the rotors.
The second is that I’d need to find some way to allow the plates to pivot losely on the axle.
I’m not completely ending this project, just putting it on hold for a while.

The up and down can be handled with rotor speed and for the res of your controls you’ll need two servos and a bearing that is fixed to the shaft but has a rotating blade link setup its confusing i’ll put a picture up.

the idea of an auto heli IS impossible with vex. heli’s are naturally unstable. even if u get it off the ground it will be in the ground effect which makes it even more unstable. so if u can overcome that then u need to change the flying style once you’re out of the ground effect

to get best results i’d use hollow but strong plastic blades normal vex motors and as minimal metal pieces as possible to make it light andreally fast

This is almost impossible because the rotor speed would have to be incredible to create the lift neccessary for this task. It would take at least 2 maybe 3 motors geared for insane speed and you wouldnt have a lot of control because the speed will have to stay above a certain RPM.

:mad: dang then the only way this would work is if you would get a motor controller for $50 and get a 24 volt motor thats light then adapt to vex shaft

it is totally impossible to make a helicopter out of entirely out of vex,here are reasons for my thinking:

-too heavy
-motors too small
-not nearly enough lift from blades- cant turn fast enough
-not enough power from batts
-too many parts-too much weight
-even if you could use another high-performance motor and power supply, too heavy, and if lift was somehow achieved, would spin out of control due to only a one-way twist on the blades.
and with a countering blade -either above origional, or at the tail, the blade would be impossible to tune to get it just right for a flight

to sum it up, no, there is no way to make vex fly, even with way-faster motors and blades, sorry but the facts have spoken

it would have been very cool, though!!:smiley: :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

Thats what I’ve been saying!!!

To everyone who’s been saying it’s impossible to make a VEX robot fly: in the 1400’s, it was also impossible to sail all the way around the world. In the 1930’s, it was impossible for there to be matter in the universe that we couldn’t detect.

It’s all possible, if you’re smart about it. I agree that VEX motors are not the way to go, however if you can get two similar large motors, something like what you would find in a large RC truck (about 1" long, 5/8" in diameter, or similar), and you can either rig it up with the new $10 VEX motor controller board (basically the electronics from one of their motors, minus the motor itself, designed to make the VEX Blue motors compatible with the VEX Red system), or if you know how to use the default code library, you can use one of the first 4 motor ports on CCP mode to generate the power PWM signal to a MOSFET (or a few parallel MOSFETs) going directly to the battery. If you want to do a counter-rotating design, you could use two, but it’s much harder to rig up the mechanics.

One other possibility is to use two main rotors, like those personnel carriers they use in the military. This would mostly make active rotary stabilization unnecessary, and you could vary pitch by changing the ratio of the speed between the two rotors. If you did three, it would be something like an aerial Kiwi drive (Killough platform, by another name, the three omniwheels). Unfortunately, with any design you go with, there will be quite a few control problems for which you will have to compensate by good sensors and good code.

But I think you can do this if you have the time and will to put into the project. It’s all possible, just probably not with exclusively VEX parts.