DIY Drones

Jack Crossfire
  • San Ramon, CA
  • United States
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Do a Goog on Poor Man's GPS.
3 hours ago
The BMP085 looked like a good deal compared to the SCP1000.
3 hours ago
Still a painfully expensive way to get a uBlox-5 compared to the GPS Bee but you are paying for the support community.
3 hours ago
This is called vectored thrust. People normally use 3 rotors & vector 1 rotor for yaw control. The biggest win in multi rotor design would be a way to connect 3 rotors to a single motor & use collective pitch for attitude control. That would be mech…
11 hours ago
The T-Rex 450 rotor head is what most people use for this. It was under $200 last year & can be converted to flybarless. Since modern gyros are free, most people don't bother with bell hiller mixing anymore.
yesterday
yesterday
Now that it's making the blog rounds again, what's the difference between the AF flapping wing MAV & the army flapping wing MAV? Don't think they would be any match for normal Rain Francisco wind.
yesterday
Ning could also allow more than 20 photos per page & automatic blog backups if it really wanted the Goog acquisition.
on Saturday
Miss when the drones were front page news on Spectrum & the life insurance was hobbyist fodder.
on Saturday
Refinance the dog & retire. Oh yeah. India still prefers to invest in a silly space program.
on Friday
If its this Cinelerra (http://cinelerra.org/) then its open source and runs on linux. A good guide on how to use it for motion stabilization is here as well http://crazedmuleproductions.blogspot.com/2009/03/motion-stabilization-tutorial.html I'll h…
on Friday
"Video stabilization is done in Cinelerra. Since that is a professional program, don't have a recommendation for diydroners to use for their own video stabilization." --Jack from his last comment in his blog post: http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/b
on Friday
What software did you use to create that helmet cam video? I assume its all made up of still images?
on Friday
Jack Crossfire added a blog post
MARCY 3 REVEALED, MARCY 2 REVEALED, MARCY 1 RADIO DISASTERS MARCY 3 REVEALED There's the current Marcy 3 plan. Unfortunately not enough space to build her. Basically install a fuselage around Vika 1. It's obsolete but it was the real Major Marcy…
on Friday
When Ning finally allows the ridiculously small text box to be resized, it'll get a Nobel peace prize.
on Friday
It's a bit confusing because they both have microcontrollers capable of doing all the functions of an autopilot, but redundancy is the cost of making 1 piece of hardware that does everything.
on Thursday
:-O
on Wednesday
Jack, here is a link to a video I just uploaded which gives a visual impression of what is going on: http://www.diydrones.com/video/worldairtraffic024h-1 Cheers, Mike
on Wednesday
Jack Crossfire added a blog post
So much for America's over crowded airspace as a reason for banning UAV's. aero-news Theoretically the region between Japan & India contains most of the world's traffic, has more aircraft per square mile than US, yet is more flexible for unmanned…
February 2
You need to get a boss who lets you transcode audio at your day job.
February 2

Profile Information

About Me:
The off topic blog posts are on http://heroineworshiper.blogspot.com.

The 1st 3 years of flying + more off topic posts are on http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/member.php?u=115141

Image processing, robotics, & aeronautics are on http://heroinewarrior.com

Most diy droners are RC modelers who just want to automate their favorite model plane. We came from an image processing & robotics background, not an RC modeling background, so our focus is on flight control, image acquisition, & blogs that no-one reads.
Hometown:
Pleasanton, Calif*

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Jack Crossfire's Blog

Jack Crossfire

THIS WEEK IN AEROSPACE

MARCY 3 REVEALED, MARCY 2 REVEALED, MARCY 1 RADIO DISASTERS



MARCY 3 REVEALED






There's the current Marcy 3 plan. Unfortunately not enough space to build her. Basically install a fuselage around
Vika 1. It's obsolete but it wa… Continue

Posted on February 5, 2010 at 12:39am — 3 Comments

Jack Crossfire

Asian air space Eclipses North America As World’s busiest

So much for America's over crowded airspace as a reason for banning UAV's.

aero-news


Theoretically the region between Japan & India contains most of the world's traffic, has more aircraft per square mile than US, yet is more flexible for unmanned traffic.

Posted on February 2, 2010 at 7:54pm — 2 Comments

Jack Crossfire

THIS WEEK IN AEROSPACE

A MATERIAL THAT BONDS TO PLASTIC


After years of JB Weld, Cyanoacrylate, & epoxy failures, someone in China finally invented a material that bonds to plastic: SHAPELOCK You might even bypass the shipping costs by driving to Sunnyvale & getting it from this guy's house.

http://shapelock.com/

Heat it to 150F & it permanently sticks to plastic, allowing repairs to ever broken T-Rex landing gear. It can also be hand molded int… Continue

Posted on January 29, 2010 at 10:30am — 6 Comments

Jack Crossfire

THIS WEEK IN MARCY 1 AVIATION



Decal applied.



Continue

Posted on January 22, 2010 at 1:27am — 6 Comments

Jack Crossfire

MARCY-1 LIFTS OFF



There it is. Marcy-1's first free flight on the golf course.

The 900Mhz RC transmitter interferes with the telemetry receiver even though they're on opposite ends of 915Mhz. You need to keep them separated or on different bands, which requires rebuilding the entire transmitter.

The notoriously fickle captu… Continue

Posted on January 15, 2010 at 10:30am — 7 Comments

Comment Wall (10 comments)

At 6:54am on March 30, 2008, Howard Gordon said…
Interesting reading. I spent some time with your blog at rcgroups, noting in particular your application of artificial neural nets. I may have missed a jump in your progression, but are you still running the lwneuralnet on a gumstix ? Just wondering, as most neural net libraries use floating point, but the gumstix only has fpu emulation, which is not fast.

Reason I ask is that I converted a simple back prop library to integer math and built it into my firmware, but have just started to think about how to incorporate it into actual operation. As you already have real-world experience in integrating back prop functions, I wondered if you wanted to give the code a try (on the ground) to see if the integer approximations are sufficiently accurate. I map 0.0 : 1.0 into 0 : 1024. If interested, code is here. Let me know if you have a chance to experiment - I'd appreciate some feedback.
At 12:26pm on March 30, 2008, Jack Crossfire said…
Converted lwneuralnet to integer a long time ago. It worked for solving the neural network but not for back propagation. Back propagation required more precision & full range beyond 0-1. 2048 lookup table entries was the largest before the cache overflowed.
At 5:58am on November 28, 2008, Constantinescu said…
Please help me to find all details concerning the software and hardware of version 2 implementation on a T-REX450 with a laptop. I intend to reproduce that on my ECO8.Many thanks,Georges
At 11:26pm on November 28, 2008, Constantinescu said…
Thanks for your answer. I alreadi recovered the archive. Could you please send me some more detals concerning the hardware(components, electric connections, procedures for preliminar adjustement of parameters, etc); something "pense bete" for a beginer in the field. Yours Georges
At 10:57pm on April 8, 2009, H Cheung said…
Yeah, I should have included that. Anyways, I added a link to the ublox module I have, it's this:

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8889
At 9:32pm on May 25, 2009, Zik said…
Hi Jack - thanks for your comments on picoc. Yes, it's still alpha quality at this stage. I'm still working on it pretty heavily but hope to reach a 1.0 release in the not too distant future.
At 8:10am on July 25, 2009, vinay r said…
Hi Jack, i am trying to develop a fixed plane UAV which i transmit all the data (sensor + GPS) to the ground station(computer) for processing and from the ground station send the pwm values back to the servos onboard the UAV to control the servos. Chris in this post said that you had done an helicopter on that concept. http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/autopilot-processing-in-ground
Did you face any problems while implementing it? Any piece of advice would be useful for me at this stage of development.
At 9:38pm on October 17, 2009, Andy Geppert said…
Jack, any chance you're in flying in the bay area Sunday (the 17th)? I'm in the area this weekend and it would be cool to meet you and see your machine fly.
At 2:10pm on December 4, 2009, Sahil Jain said…
so Chris is from Sparkfun? and you're from...?

sorry, for asking these questions. I am trying to design a board that I want to sell in the $80-100 price range. so trying to understand the target costs. any help would be appreciated. Just for fun, not going to make any money on it. Thanks.
At 2:33pm on December 8, 2009, Jack Crossfire said…
Most of the people on diydrones sell products through Sparkfun. The standard arrangement is to add 40% to the price & Sparkfun adds another 40% to the price. It's no secret. A place like Cloudcap adds 1000% to the parts. Personally working in Indian outsourcing where they expect a 12 hour / 6 day commitment & if you're spending evenings selling your own product instead of your boss's, it better produce a 1000% return or you're out. All your time is company time in outsourcing.

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