R2Home - GPS Guided Recovery System
Introduction: R2Home - GPS Guided Recovery System
R2Home is a fully autonomous, GPS guided, parafoil recovery system. Its job is to make sure the weather balloon, or model rocket you launch to "the edge of space", comes back exactly where you want it to land! I believe the next space race is about coming back to Earth, in a smart, guided and safe way!
Still not sure about what R2Home really is? I got you covered: just check this video :
I've been working on this project for two years now (and counting!) and I feel like to explain my project in real details to someone I would need a solid 6 month long discussion. But I just started university. So instead I wrote an hackaday page and this intructables page.
This page is about the main "project steps" if you want to get a ready to fly R2Home. For more details about "the project", "the concept", and its "history", you can check this hackaday.io page. If you want to understand the project before reading theses more precise steps, I recommend checking the hackaday page first.
Step 1: Finding Your Wing
One of the main components on R2Home is the steerable parachute wing. The good news is you can use a few different types of parachutes. The first solution if you have a lot of time, and you like spending it on a sewing machine, is to make your own ram air parachute canopy. Don't let it fool you! It's not that complicated! I did it so you can do it too!
If you want to do your own wing, here is a drive folder with a lot of ressources I found on the internet : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Ji09ofrk6...
You have to know that a ram air parachute will be easier to deploy, because the aspect ratio of the wing is low. However, a single skin paraglider wing will have much greater flight performances.
Depending on where you live, and your budget, you might be able to choose between few commercially available single skin RC paraglider wings. You want to find something with a wing area of about 0.8m^2. Here is for example the wing I'm using : http://www.airc2fly.de/swift/swift_de.html
Step 2: The Dbag and Drogchute
All right, so now that you have your wing, you need two other things directly related to the wing. 33
You need a "magic" drogchute, and a dbag (the role of these two parts is explained in detail on the hackaday page). You can really easily make both of them. They are made using F-111 fabric, you will also need some mesh fabric, a tubular cord, a dyneema or kevlar thread.
The drogchute is made out of two round identical pieces of fabric, one out of F-111 fabric, and another one out of mesh fabric. The diameter of the circle is determining the diameter of the drogchute (go for 50cm for a first one). The first step is to sew both pieces flat together. You want to have a seam on most of the circle, while keeping a small space without seam. Then you can turn the whole fabric through the hole you left in the outer seam and you should now have what looks like a flat soccer ball.
The next step is to pass the kevlar thread through the mesh fabric, and sew it on the center of the round piece of fabric made out of F-111. Then you want to sew the tubular cord on the center of the round mesh fabric, you want to make sure you are still able to get the kevlar thread sliding in it after sewing it.
Here is how it should be looking once finished :
For the Dbag you only need to sew a rectangular piece of F-111 in a cylinder of the same diameter of R2Home (3"). But before, you need to sew on it the orange cord you can spot on the picture above. On this cord, there is a loop at the top and at the bottom to connect on one side to R2Home, and on the other side to the drogchute.
On each side of the Dbag, you also want to add a pocket for the wing suspensions lines (see last picture).
Step 3: Folding the Wing
Now that you have your wing, and the Dbag, it's about the right time to learn about how to fold the wing to get a nice deployment. The deployment theory is explained in details on the hackaday project page. Here is about how to fold the wing :
First step is to get it flat on the ground. 455