Veeduber wrote:
On May 26, 6:17 pm, Brian Whatcott wrote:
What an imaginative idea. I know there is a certain class of folks who
already make surface submersibles (only the snorkels show...)
but they keep them crewed, and run a diesel to get them to the US with
their valuable aromatic or sensory modification goods.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Brian (and the Group),

If you are familiar with trans-Atlantic flights of model airplanes...
or of the campus-to-campus flights of model airplanes buzzing along a
carefully pre-planed flight-path between Miami and Boston, the
following will not come as a surprise.

The original Varieze was meant to be powered by a VW... and would have
been far more successful, in my opinion, had they used my engine
instead of Ted's. Water under the bridge and so forth. However, some
diligent gentlemen from south of the border have apparently been
making flights north of it in un--manned Variezes using VW engines
with the prop on the proper end of the crank. One of their flight
paths is said to be from the strip at the LA Bay junction to one of
the WWII air strips out in the Mohave, where control is transferred to
a local transmitter for landing. Once on the ground the cargo is
removed, the bird refueled and sent back south. Another flight path,
said to be the original, was from a strip in Sinaloa to a stretch of
highway in Arizona, the move to Baja and the Mojave the result of
inter-tribal warfare.

All just Hobby Shop rumor, of course. Or rather the product of
several hundred rumors about home-built RPV's heard but not seen as
they putter their merri way back & forth at zero altitude, delivering
Ami-Rica's most popular yarb at a hundred keys per trip. And if they
lose one now & then it's no big deal. VW engines are cheap and so are
N7EZ's if you don't have to worry about a canopy nor any human flight
controls.

-R.S.Hoover

Ha! I had heard about the trans-Atlantic trips (and maybe some
Trans-Pacific endeavors too,) but the inter campus express had passed me by.
But in that connection, I can tell you about a hardware equivalent to
the hugely successful Open Software movement, GNU, copyleft, and all
that good stuff.
It focusses on a little microcontroller card called the Arduino,
of which the current implementation is called the Duemilanuove
(Italian for "2009") It is about 2 X 2 inches.
This has attracted a large active following from
people who make things. It has a USB socket for power and downloading.
A FREE soft development capability on your PC. Hundreds or thousands
of applications in software - available cards for expanders and whatever.
And the good news is - the entry price for the whole shebang is under
$50 - and you will be testing an on board flasher you programmed and
compiled, on the first day you get it. It has AtoDs DtoAs, DOs DIs
a k or two of memory for code, etc, etc....
The reason I gushed on about this is that I stumbled on it when reading
about a drone (RPV) autopilot, wing leveler, GPS waypoint follower -
with smooth switchover to radio control. This is the Ardupilot.
Around $100 basic.

Less than $500 gets the controller, the servoes the GPS the
application, the custom PCB, an IR horizon wing leveler and pitch
controller. Oh, and the model electric plane and RC gear to try it out with.

First batch sold out....
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/200...le_uav_co.html
or in tiny format:
http://tinyurl.com/pqz2ev

Ardupilot home page
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blog/s...ogPost%3A44814
or in tiny format:
http://tinyurl.com/5g5gho

Amazing!

Brian W