Brendan A R Sechter's Development Blog

The companion articles in this series took the propulsion of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle as given. One sized the runway from a thrust-to-weight ratio it assumed, another

A fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle can reach flying speed and return to the ground without a runway, and the methods that make this possible are the subject of this article. A companion piece sized the runway itself, and the recurring theme ...

A fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle needs ground to accelerate to flying speed and ground to slow back down, and the question of how much ground has a surprisingly structured answer. One variable dominates, namely the speed the aircraft must reach, because the distance to reach a speed grows with the square of that speed. Everything else, the runway slope, the surface, the w...

Iterating on an airframe is slow. A built-up balsa wing takes hours of skilled cutting and gluing, and a molded composite part takes a plug and a mold before the first usable copy exists. Both punish the change of a single dimension. A different approach has matured over the past few years. Print the airframe geometry directly in a foaming filament called

Most programmers have met access control. A file has permissions, a database row has an owner, an endpoint checks a token. Access control answers one question, namely who is allowed to read a piece of data. It says nothing about a second question that matters just as much, namely where that data is allowed to go after an authorized party has read it. A function that is permit...