Martı-III

The first project outside a screen

Everything I had built until then lived inside a screen. Martı-III was a physical thing with weight, balance and parts that could break.

It taught me that a design mistake does not raise a compiler error, it hits the ground. That left me with a habit which later paid off in software too: think before you run it.

This project is a large part of why I turned to software seriously. It was the first time I produced something with a team of different specialisms rather than on my own.

The 3D design

The aircraft’s three-dimensional design was mine. Fixed-wing is a far less forgiving category than rotary: you cannot hover, so take-off, glide and landing have to be planned as one continuous movement.

Almost every design decision was a search for balance. A larger wing lifts more but drags more; a heavier fuselage survives more but takes off harder; a longer tail flies more stably but turns more sluggishly.

I learned there that a model looking good on screen and a model flying are different things. Every dimension needed a justification, and we had to defend that justification in writing in the competition report.

Autopilot and Mission Planner

Alongside the design I worked on the autopilot software. We prepared flight plans, tuned parameters and followed telemetry through Mission Planner.

Putting waypoints on a map was the easy part; the real work was tuning the parameters that decide how the aircraft behaves between those points. Push a control gain too high and the aircraft oscillates; leave it too low and the wind pushes it off course.

It was the first time I saw the gap between simulation and a real flight. A plan that looked flawless on screen could be rewritten from scratch on the field because of wind.

Reaching the finals

Reaching the finals was not something one person could do. Aerodynamics, electronics, fabrication and reporting sat with different people, and all of it had to connect.

Teknofest’s documentation load — design reports, critical design reviews — felt tedious at that age. Looking back, that was exactly the part which taught me that if you cannot write down what you built, it does not count as built.