Project Flying Robot: I Believe I Can Fly

At long last, after many obstacles to be surmounted, yesterday we achieved liftoff. The blimp prototype "Rogue 1" of our flying_robot project to create a platform for Ruby Arduino Development powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has achieved an important milestone.

After our third complete rewiring of the main circuit board, two burned out Pololu micro serial motor controllers, some time reviewing the schematics of the Blimpduino project, and too many revisions to the basic software to list here, we had finally gotten everything ready for what would hopefully be a successful flight test.

There were some major limitations to this test, which was mostly intended to verify proper functioning and integration of the hardware. Happening inside my brother's small apartment, we would not be able to really do much flying. Also, we were going to measure our maximum payload capacity, but not really planning on balancing the blimp to achieve a proper neutral buoyancy.

The final assembly took place, we did a quick flight check, and you can see for yourself the results in this poorly shot and edited, but somehow still amusing video.

Now, this thing is really starting to take off!