UAV design book

Our new book on the design of small fixed wing unmanned aircraft is out  (see this post).

It is accompanied by a couple of software tools, which the reader may choose to include in their own design processes (under the conditions of the GNU General Public License).

First, it contains two Jupyter notebooks to be used for constraint analysis in the first stage of the concept design process, one written in Python 2, another in Python 3. The notebooks are self-contained, save for one package: Kevin Horton’s Aero-Calc. This needs to be installed first before the notebooks can be run (a version translated into Python 3 can be found here). pip can be used to install the Python 2 version of the package (type pip install aerocalc in a terminal window); the Python 3 version can simply be copied to a folder where your Python installation looks for packages.

UPDATE: The constraint analysis example described in the book now has a new home and it is based on the new ADRpy aircraft design library. More details in this post.

We have also included a parametric geometry script, which will build the Decode 1 model described in the book. This is essentially the script from the Appendix of the book, which uses the AirCONICS library of Rhinoceros 3D Python 2.7 scripts – you can download both from here (make sure you edit the setup file, adding your own path to wherever you downloaded the code to, as well as to the Selig coordinate database you will have downloaded with AirCONICS and unzipped into a separate folder).

Finally, here are a few errors we spotted after the book went to print: errata