Great talking to you today. We are on it with using your designs here, and look forward to dovetailing our efforts. Power to the PictEarth People!

Thanks for setting this up.

Hey Chris,

I just read your post on UAVs and I'm wondering if there's anywhere that one could purchase a pre-made UAV...couldn't find one on ebay.
I run a network of websites, www.ballerhouse.com, and am considering featuring a UAV article. Can you point me in the direction of where someone could purchase one? If so, what other info should my readers know?
Thanks!
Mark L
markl@ballerhouse.com

Chris,
If you want to do a Q&A with me, that would be fine.

The reason for the board is that my son and I thought it would be fun to build our own board, develop theory, and write firmware. We were inspired by Maynard Hill, who came to town and gave a talk.
We got our feet wet with a rapid-prototyping board mounted on an RC truck, and then build our own board for a sailplane. We bought our parts from SparkFun. Nathan Seidle, the ownder of Sparkfun, asked me what we were doing, I told him, he offered to build a surface mount board for me.
My son and I spent a few delightful summers getting the firmware working. At the time, our goal was to play, to just do some interesting things with it, without any goal in mind. When we were done, we had something that worked to our satisfaction, Nathan asked if he could sell it, we gave him permission.
We recognized that what we had was not a full-fletched autopilot, but that it might be interesting to anyone wanting to tinker with the controller. They could build on our firmware, if they wanted, or start from stratch, if they were ambitious.
By the way, the main reason we used assembly language was that my son had never written any, and he wanted to learn. He had used lots of other languages, but not assembly.
As far as what people are doing with my board, you probably have more information than I have!! The only person I've talked to so far is a member of diydrones. All I know is that the board is selling well at SparkFun, with no complaints.
By the way, the reason the board has been backordered for so long is that the vendor of the GPS replaced their ET301 with an ET312 at the same time that SparkFun was automating their board production, resulting in some defective boards. Even after we worked out the hardware problems, there was a subtle change in the ET312 that caused some problems. Every board that SparkFun builds is tested with the full firmware running, and the boards were not passing. We finally figured out what was wrong, production is resumed, I guess they are catching up on backorders.
All of the work my son and I was deliberately done in a vacuum...we didn't do any research on what other people were doing. We made some mistakes (that was the point) and had some fun.
My background is an electrical engineer with strengths in control theory, mathematics, and theory of flight.
I work at GE's research labs, I've been there for 33 years.
You might want to do a Google on "William Premerlani" to see what I have been up to. Much of it has to do with software development...you gave me a good chuckle when you said in your review that you wondered why we hadn't used C...the answer is, it would have been too easy!!!
Bill

any time if u like to have a wet dip & country village food, come over try our our boats,(planty of spcae for plane flys
elisa

I heard you on Talk of the Nation today...great job! I did not get to hear the whole show, but definately heard the part about your "robotics" site and 3-axis accelerometers. You, my friend, rock!

By the way, thanks for the advice about starting out in R/C with a foamie...else I would not have made it past my first flight attempts.

Hey Chris,

I won honorable mention, best in category, best in engineering, 550$, and an internship offer, at the state science & engineering fair. (The winners were a guy who did computer simulations of bird flu epidemics to determine the best method to distribute a limited supply of antivirals, a girl who developed an advanced, complex robotic vision algorithm which could detect blobs in foggy areas and high altitude ranges, and a guy who figured out a method to stem the growth of certain forms of cancer, so it was a humbling experience).

I just wanted to thank you for making this website and for your great documention and projects, because without them I'd probably still be trying to figure out how to connect the GPS receiver to the Stamp.

Thanks!

- Simon

Thanks Chris,

Been following along for some time (geekdad) and just bought a Blubberbot for something to do over the summer holidays... thinking about the project possibilities for my kids in electronics 11/12 ... hmmm blimp racing? Anyway, great to be here.