EHawk, A Student Built Electric Plane
- Completed Spring 2022
- March 15, 2026
- 2:54 pm
EHawk is an electric-powered motor glider project created at ‘Iolani School. The aircraft represents an innovative first step in advancing sustainable air travel while exposing students (like me!) to disciplines in engineering, aviation, and project management.
The ultimate goal of the project was to fly the aircraft within the Hawaiian islands using only renewable energy (which spoiler alert- did happen!).
My Contribution
My main contribution to this project was updating the control panel to correctly process and log flight data to an SD card. Besides from that, I helped present our battery powered plane to the local news and was around for its first flight! If you want to see more of that, check out the videos at the bottom of this page.
Pretty Visuals, but no functionality
When I joined the EHawk project, while there was a functional visual system, the actual data was not yet being read correctly, and I was challenged with both ensuring the data that was being read was being averaged and logging any data about the flight to an SD card so it could be analyzed later.
Updated Visuals, Current and Voltage averaging.
By the end of the project, I had made some minor tweaks to the visuals, refactored a lot of code, and was logging flight data to the on board SD Card.
Changes made using Git
Any work I did on this project was pushed to git. I actually hold this project pretty fondly in this regard because it was one of my first times using github to keep track of changes, and I made a LOT of mistakes along the way, including one time where I basically had to completely reset the repository 😅. Feel free to look through my code, I’m sure there are many things in it that I would do differently now, but I’m honestly proud of how well I documented my code even back in 2022.
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Videos
EHawk takes Flight!
I was able to see the bird fly during my time on the project! It’s actually crazy to think that something I worked on flew, even if I only worked directly on the telemetry. In this video around 1:30, I talk a little bit about the plane in this video.
Local News Interview
This was just a really cool experience. We got interviewed by the local news, and they must have liked the way I talked because they ended up showing my speaking part within it!
Interested in more?
I was actually lucky enough that the amazing teacher responsible for this project (Mr.Emde) created and hosted his own website showing so much more about this awesome project than I could ever show in a small post like this. If you’re interested, click the box below to check it out!