[Claudius]

Not sure if this belongs in the "Videos: Other" or "Videos: Flying" thread, but here's a video of something I've been up to:

Inside the plane is an autopilot, running a hardware-in-the-loop simulation against the flight simulator on the laptop. What this means is that the flight sim on the laptop tells the autopilot "where" it is, how fast it is going etc, and the autopilot sends back control inputs for the flight simulator to apply. Rinse, repeat.

In other words, the autopilot is essentially flying the flight sim.

And this is being controlled by the iPad app I've built, which is sending mission commands to the autopilot wirelessly via the radio modem - in effect telling the autopilot where it should fly to. Geeky enough?

In real life, this would translate to being able to throw a plane in the air, and just pointing on the map where you want it to go. But where's the fun in that, right?