Design Refinement

I am a newbie when it comes to quadcopters so I am looking for someone to bounce ideas off of. I have a design in my head I just want to make sure it works in implementation. I would like to design a drone/uav. I think I understand the drone part or the uav part when taken separately but once they are combined the complexity goes up. I am also on a bit of a budget so that complicates issues.

Concept:

Flying - I would like to implement a arducopter and by using the data uplink from the telemetry send the arducopter live commands from my laptop using the mission planner but I would also like to be able to remotely control it via mission planner using a gamepad (mainly because I do not want to buy redundant systems control systems to keep the cost down and to minimize the number of transmitters and receivers on the quadcopter thereby keeping interference to a minimum). I understand from reading the documentation for the arducopter that both of these are able to be done using mission planner. I would also like to be able to set preset paths and let the copter make the flight by itself with no external inputs.

FPV - I am thinking that I will use my laptop as my single command base and as such I would like to take the FPV video feed and put it into the computer so that I can monitor the video as well as control my quadcopter from a single device (minimizing the chance for me to forget crucial pieces at home since there are fewer of them and to minimize how much equuipment I need to lug around). My plan is just to use a generic usb video capture card to capture the video input and some simple software to display it.

Homemade parts:

Frame - I currently envision the frame as a couple of aluminum tent poles set up in an X shape. The reason I chose tent poles is that they are very strong but also flexible enough to take a good crash without breaking. The other nice thing about tent poles is by cutting the ends back a little bit and flattening them you have a pretty solid mounting platform for the motors. I am unsure what I want to use for the legs yet my preliminary idea is maybe a bent paper clip since the legs will take the hardest beating in the beginning while I am getting it dialed in and who want to spend loads of money on something that is just going to break.

Parts List:

This is the parts list as I understand it I would welcome comments on whether or not I need more things than I am listing.

- Arducopter

- Telemetry transeiver set (900Mhz)

- Computer

- Game pad

- 4 ~850KV motors

- 4 ESCs (

- 4 props (2CW, 2CCW)

- gps

- 5000 mah 3S 25C LiPo battery 

- Computer video input

- camera

- video tx/rx modules (1.2Ghz)

- Frame

Thanks for your time and suggestions.

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Replies

  • It sounds like you want to control it only over something running on Windows.
    Windows... Just rethink it.
    • I actually have a Mac but you make a good point. I should have system restores just in case my info gets corrupted my drone won't be down.
      • you mentioned Mission planner, it doesnt not run well in MONO, thanks to the unholy .net mess which MONO is trying to keep up with.

        You can run APM Planner 2 natively on Mac or Linux

        Still, any joystick input will have a bit of extra latency due to mavlink transmission, and, telemetry is not exactly a safe communication channel : http://madhacker.org/?p=13

        I would have a radio around.

        • Thank you for the helpful information on telemetey module hijacking. I am going to have to chew on that for a while and see whether a point to point scrambling is feasible. As far as mission planner goes I had heard that it ran on macs but was unaware that it was trying to run .net on a Mac. Thank you for the suggestion to switch to APM planner. As for the rc lag issue when using the telemetry and a gamepad I was aware of it and was planning on doing some testing to try to see if I could get the lag down to an acceptable amount. I am not that worried about a .5 second delay but much more could be annoying.
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