leetZeppelin - Arduino powered blimp with TV-B-Gone

leetZeppelin was build by me and Fredrik (@fleijon) for an exhibition that the company we work for, tretton37 (tretton = thirteen), had at a software conference. The blimp is powered with an Arduino fio that communicates with a computer using xbees and is controlled with a Wiimote connected to the same computer. For fun we added a tv-b-gone to it that could be triggered if the secret key combination ]

More info and build log can be found at Latest happenings

Hardware - Zeppelin
Arduino FIO
XBee
Servo motors
2 x Servo motor or motor controller
Motor
Proppeler
Blimp Balloon Envelope (rctoys.com)
IR Led
Carbon fiber tube
Lego Gears
Lipo Battery – 1s 1000 mAh

Hardware - C&C
XBee
XBee Explorer USB
Wii mote
Computer running Linux
Bluetooth dongle

Have fun!
/Marcus

looks good
but the video says "an error occurred please try later"

try to reload the page or go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geMrAmBJsls

yup fine now!
it must be later already
good looking machine
how do you control altitude?

we controlled the altitude by change the direction of the motors

800×598 182 KB

800×598 168 KB

er
I meant how do you make the blimp go up and down?

the servo on the first picture change the angle on the motors so it change the direction of the trust from the motors.

and the angle is controlled by the wiimote

ah
that makes sense!