Read time: 5.9 minutes (591 words)

Preface

Warning

This project is a work in progress. As of Oct 1, I have enough tools devleoped to provide a command line application that can analyze the model airplanes I am presenting here. If you are visiting this site after reading my NFFS Symposium article, please let me know what you think about all of this, and what you might like to see added to the tool set.

The Math-Magik Project

This project began as an experiment. I wanted to see if I could design an indoor model airplane using OpenSCAD, a popular, free, open-source, 3D modeling program. As my experiment progressed, it occurred to me that I could go further. OpenSCAD can generate files suitable for generating 3D printer parts, but that was not likely to be useful to a model airplane builder. Instead, the files generated by OpenSCAD can be used to perform an analysis of the mass properties of a part. Using this data, you can calculate the model weight, center of gravity location, the geometric bounds of a model, and the mass moments of inertia, all of which might be useful in performing more detailed analysis of a model design.

NFFS 2021 Symposium

About the time this project was producing some interesting results, I spotted a call for papers for the 2021 National Free Flight Society Symposium, a technical journal for model builders. I set out to write an article that might be suitable for this publication, and submitted it as a proposal. It was accepted and is now available from NFFS.

However, the publication had constraints that meant that a lot of the material had to be abbreviated to fit into the journal. Since I have a long history of generating lecture materials and posting them on web servers, I decided to generate a much more detailed set of documents to accompany this publication. All of that material is available here, and future developments will be added as well.

Analysis Program

In my experiments, I put together snippets of code that performed some of the analytical steps I envisioned for the design. These experiments were fine for a programmer, but would not be that useful to the average model builder, even one who might read the Symposium article. What I needed to do was generate a full fledged application that could be used by model builders. To keep things simple, the program would be written in Python and packaged for distribution on any platform: PC, Mac, or Linux. I decided to generate a graphical interface to assist in managing the design process and performing the analysis steps. The Qt graphics library was chosen for this work, and the final application will be available as a completely self-contained application for all platforms.

The Project Diary

I am an educator, and i like to explain how things get put together. For that reason, I am including a development diary in this project, detailing the steps I took to generate the complete project package: documentation, analysis code, and test model designs.

Model builders may wish to skip the development material and focus on those parts that will be useful in building their own designs. For the more technical folks, the analysis section may prove interesting. I am going to try to add as much theoretical material as I can to enhance the usefulness of this project in model design work. Finally, software folks will find the development material useful, and may inspire them to assist in the further development of this project.

All of the material produced for this project can be found on my GitHub account at https://github.com/rblack42/math-magik. The supporting Python application can be found there as well.

Hopefully this will prove to be useful to the model building community. I owe much of my professional career to that group of folks, and this is my chance to pay back something!

Roie R. Black

AMA 18079
B.S., M.S., Aerospace Engineering, Virginia Tech
M.S Computer Science, Texas State
Major, USAF (retired)
Professor, Computer Science, Austin Community College (retired)