Our hovercraft, or LOBBYIST, was modeled after a famous pirate ship; we call her "The blACK pearl". It's a remake of Jack Sparrow's ship with a spin of Duron and modern electronics. Our design hovers around using a soft skirt design and two propeller fans to steer the ship.
First Prototype
SteeringFor our first checkpoint, we simply mounted two propeller fans at the perimeter of our platform 180 degrees from each other and were able to control the whole platform very decently. This skirt design worked so well that we kept it when we moved on to our second prototype.
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Second Prototype
Deck Layout
Steering Fan Mounts
We made our steering fan mounts out of laser cut Duron. The concentric cutouts on the two surfaces that sandwich the propellers helped in improving the airflow through the fans. However, the back side could have used more cuts near the center since that limited our thrust to some extent.
Display of Memory and Commitment (DMC)
We designed a flag pole for indicating the state of pairing. When a controller paired with our hovercraft, the flag would move to the top and it would start to descend slowly until it reached the bottom 45 seconds later, indicating that the pairing session was done.
We used a 180 degree servo to pull the flag over a distance of 20 cm. To achieve this range we designed our own gearing mechanism with two stages of 1:2 gear ratio each. |