I've been building both AutoPilots, and QuadraCopters, and I wanted to drive more servos and ESCs, with less jitter, so I used some ideas from the Paparazzi gang and developed a way to drive up to 10 servos with just 2 output pins from an Arduino or ATMega8.



The design uses just one chip, a Johnson style Decade Counter, and requires only two output pins from the Arduino. The Arduino uses one PWM pin (pin9), and one general IO pin (pin8). All the pulse… Continue

I wanted two way communication with my airplane, and had moved the serial communication stuff to a 2nd arduino (see my prev blog) but I didn't like the way the code looked, so I reconfigured the system to have the 2nd Arduino handle the GPS and Gyro, and then use I2c to send the data to the main processor. Essentially making the GPS into an I2c device, and freeing up the main serial port for 2-way com with the ground.…

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I wanted two way communication with my aircraft, but when the GPS is running, the Arduino board only has 1 side of its single serial port available, so I added another Arduino Mini to provide 2-way communication between my ground station and the aircraft.



The additional board consists of a 5 volt Arduino Mini Pro, with a ATMega 328 chip running at 16 mHz, and a Spark Fun 5 volt carrier board for the XBee. That's it. I had to move my Gyro to this new board, cause I used I2c to link… Continue

While flight testing my Magpie and ArduPilot, I was having a problem with over-shoot during Way Point Navigation. After hitting the way point, the aircraft would start turning towards the next way point, and then continue turning until way past the bearing to the next way point, requiring the aircraft to make a sweeping s-turn to get back on track towards the next way point.…

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I've been tuning the GPS portion of my ArduPilot / Magpie airframe combination, and put together this flight data recorder to save the results of the flights without having to take a laptop out to the field.





The data recorder consists of a Spark Fun Data Recorder, an XBee radio modem, and… Continue