Engineering Hobbies - Aeromodelling

Aeromodelling is widely popular as an expensive hobby for those ones that like adrenaline..., but it also involves skills of engineering to, first design the aero-models, and then perform aerobatics! This is the reason why aeromodelling is one of the ten-featured hobbies of engineers!

Aeromodelling basically requires making objects that can fly… therefore, quite a bit of time and resources are spent on designing the flying machines. The design of aero-models involves quite a few engineering concepts like aerodynamics, control systems, flight mechanics and electronics (as most of the aero-models are Radio Controlled) and electrical components.

Source aerodesign
Today we would like to talk about Quetzal, a new technological development company, specialized in Aircraft systems.  

Founders of Quetzal
This company was born in 2008 with three engineering students from Mexico. These guys decided to participate in the SAE AeroDesign edition 2008 in Brasil. That experience gave to them the opportunity of learning more about drones while participating in other competitions in United States. All these competitions provided to them the experience to create “Quetzel Aerospacial”. Quetzel Aerospacial is specialized in vertical photography with a focus in the civil sector: precision farming, photogrammetry, construction monitoring, tourism, 3D modelling etc.

Check out this video to know more about Queztal Aerospacial. A really nice story… congrats to Jorge, Gerardo and Olvera!

Now, this experience reminds us to our battery monitoring competition, and their winners. If you remember, Acciona Microenergía was looking for improving the lifespan of lead batteries in photovoltaic systems. And they needed a reliable, very cheap (remember the full system cost is a bout 300 USD) and robust solution to accurately monitor the actual charge of batteries, their operating regime, and at what point of lifespan they were at any moment. Michel & Andres - Winners of the challenge

Two participants were finally awarded for their solutions, Andrés López-Arangurén and Michel Kuenemann. Michel, a French electronic engineer proposed a new monitoring system composed of an electronic card and a SW installed on a tablet. The card, with a cost of 20 USD, was custom designed for the battery challenge however it reused his experience with similar cards being designed for his aero-models! And now we are building the prototypes to be tested in Peru soon. And the big question is whether both Michel and Andres might take advantage of this experience to create their own businesses in the future!

Why not? Do you want to learn continuously about applied engineering?

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