DigitalEvacuation.org

This is practically ancient history now but I’ve only just got around to posting the pictures. For my birthday Camilla bought me a helicopter lesson which I took at Biggin Hill Helicopters in October. The visibility on the day was quite poor so the lesson concentrated on field exercises such as hovering. The helicopter was a Hughes 300 internal combusion engine powered model which has a 190HP boxer engine.

At different times I was able to take control of the rudder, throttle, cyclic and collective controls in certain combinations but never all at once as the instructor kept control of one to get us back under control when I inevitably got out of it. The notion of hovering being like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time is true, except that it is harder! When you start getting out of control you either over compensate or undercompensate the effect of both is that, due to instability, you get more and more out of control. The most I managed while on the throttle, collective and cyclic was around 30-40s before instructor intervention.

Towards the end of the lesson the instructor took us to 1000ft and performed a simulated autorotation by cutting the engine power and letting the chopper drop until very close to the ground before winding it up again. The descent was fast and the landing, if we’d had one, would have been very hard but the impact would not have been dangerous to us or the helicopter in any way.

At Biggin Hill airfield, we spotted Bernie Ecclestone’s private plane with the F1 logo on the tail.

All in all the experience was amazing and one I’d like to repeat. Just a shame it costs £10,000+ to obtain your private helicopter pilot’s licence!

Now I’ve finally graduated from University I am able to share my final year project, entitled as this post. The work’s abstract is:

Vehicle dynamics simulations are widely used in automotive development by road car companies and race teams for predicting the performance, ride and handling of their vehicles. Race teams want to discover, in particular, how fast their car will go round a circuit in various setup configurations.

The simulation packages used are often proprietary or prohibitively expensive and therefore out of the reach of engineering students and club level race car designers. Also some parameters required to run the simulation accurately are difficult to obtain e.g. tyre data. This project presents a method to predict a car’s single lap performance including ultimate lap time and speed versus time data from empirical data straightforwardly obtained from a data logging system and engine data from a dynamometer or engine builder.

The simulator is compared against real car data logged by an acquisition system and another widely acclaimed lap time simulator, and its performance critiqued. Further enhancements to the simulator to improve its abilities are suggested.

Python was used to create a vehicle dynamics simulation of a racing car. A recent BTCC car was modelled and simulated in the package. The results of the simulation were compared with an industry standard simulator Bosch Lapsim and data from the real car logged with a Pi Research system and analysed with Pi Toolbox. Download the report and an archive containing the Python simulator, report and Lapsim input files for the BTCC car.

I flew out a couple of days early to the Beijing A1GP round giving me a chance to look around a bit (and acclimatise to the time zone!) One thing I had to see there was the Forbidden City. A freezing cold, windy Monday morning gave me the opportunity which I jumped at. Unfortunately, one morning was not enough time to do it justice and a couple of the really large palaces were covered in scaffolding as they are being refurbished for the 2008 Olympics. I did enjoy the main sights armed with an audio guide and got some good pictures though. I would love to go back and give it better attention with a proper guide in the future as the place was absolutely amazing!

September saw one LMES round, the drama in Jarama, and two A1GP rounds Zandvoort and Brno. This meant travelling for three weeks solid. No photos to speak of from Jarama but there are some grid pictures from Zandvoort and Brno.

Of particular mention, I bumped into an old friend of mine, Danni Minogue, in Zandvoort. Of course, she was happy to pose for a picture with me:

More soon…

A long weekend working at the Donington round of the LMES. Disappointing race for Zytek who retired from 2nd place with clutch failure while chasing down the leading Pescarolo on the other hand Creation had a good run bagging 2nd and 3rd at the chequered flag; the new second car (ex-team Jota) taking the higher honours. Here are the full results. I managed to take a few photos on the grid; take a look at a slideshow.

A recent blazing hot Sunday afternoon I was roped into helping make a crop circle in the shape of a pig to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Black Pig design agency; the agency my girlfriend Camilla works for. The story made the Daily Mail and Cambridge Evening News papers. After finishing the circle, which took around 8 hours, we were taken up in a Robinson R44 Raven II helicopter to view our handiwork. This was my first helicopter flight and I found it the most wonderful and exciting experience. Here is a slideshow containing some pictures of the pig and helicopter; enjoy!

At the end of June I finally finished University for the second time around. After 3 years at the University of Hertfordshire and one of the busiest years of my life I achieved a Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) in Automotive Engineering with Motorsport. When I graduate later in the year I’ll be awarded first class honours. After spending 2 weeks shoving boxes around at St Albans Majestic Wine Warehouse and a week in St Ives, Cornwall I stared my new job. I’m now a technical support engineer at Pi Research the market leader in race data logging equipment. My duties include general technical support of all products, wiring loom design, coding internal tools and trackside support at various race series. My first outside excursion looks like it’ll be the Le Mans Series (LMES) 1000KM of Donington.

Since the last update, my webhost HubNut migrated to new servers and deleted the MySQL database from the old machine without moving it. Rather than try and repair the damage on the site I decided to leave it alone until domain renewal time and start again from scratch with a new hosting provider; hopefully one with less scandalous disregard for their customer’s site data. Unfortunately, renewal time crept up on me when I was away on holiday so I reluctantly bought another year’s service rather than lose my domain to a Google-whoring shopping site. Since I was starting from scratch I decided to give Wordpress a try. This explains the technical reasons behind the lack of updates. Personal reasons will become clear in later posts.