We had a very successful flight on the Foamaroo prototype yesterday.  The Finished airframe came out at 2 lb 11 oz complete with 2200 mAH battery.  It was windy yesterday with 15 know winds and the Foamaroo handled the conditions very well. 

After a short trim flight I was able to launch…

Here are videos from my maiden and second flight. First one ended with a bad crash on a garden house, my bad I didn't realize how much space I needed to fly it for the first time. The second one isn't complete as my girlfriend forgot to pack her memory card and we couldn't capture it all. On the second one I managed to control it in circles much higher than what you see in the video, but you'll have to take my word for it…

I asked my District Website if they would post info about the AMA elections since nominations are due June 16. As an AMA member I thought it was an important issue.

Response from Bob Brown, AMA District VP:

"The following gentleman is…

I finished my SkyWalker build last night, and went out to CMAC to take it for its first flight. All the ground tests looked good (including the new 'system check' in mavproxy) so we took it for the first flight. About 60 meters into the flight I heard "MODE STABILIZE"…

Here is a video clip from Paul Mather and my last minute entry into the SparkFun Autonomous Vehicle Competition.







The day before the competition I realized that the DIYDrones community had an unused entry into the competition and I had a second UAV ready to go, so I recruited Paul Mather as a teammate and we became team "Plan B", flying a SkyWalker…

Publisher Intech ISBN 978-953-307-166-4, Hard cover, 238 pages

Author Tamer Mansour

The PID controller is considered the most widely used controller. It has numerous applications varying from industrial to home appliances. This book is an outcome of contributions and inspirations from many researchers in the field of PID control. The book consists of two…

Flew my quad for the second time today. I decided to skip the acro mode with which I had so much trouble keeping the quad stable last time and give it a try in stable mode. With the default PID setting I was able to flight it pretty stable under light wind. I made a few hard landings and finally broke my landing gear and a prop but overall I'm pretty satisfied with the performance I got from it. Last time kinda discouraged me but now I feel more comfortable controlling it (a couple hours in…

Ardu Copter Mega rev.1914

Motors: BC2836 750kv ESC: 30A

Props: Top 10x45 EPP , Bottom 10x45 EPP Composite. 

3S 5000mah

Jason added a new…

First enemy: WINDY DAYS.

It was windy but ive managed to find some less windy areas to fly today,

i decided to give it a chance, after checking all's OK in the living room, hovering about 10cm...

GPS hold seemed to work, as at one point it was drifting a lot with the wind and suddenly changing direction back to the launch point…

  4-23-10 My QuadCopter makes it first flight.   Success!

Heres a summary of Aerial Round 1:

The aerial heats started off with a blast as Team Lawn Dart one crashed into turn one's (familiar) tree shortly after an amazing auto-takeoff.

Team DIY- Drones equiped with Ardupilot  Mega auto had a great run with an auto-take off but unfortunately did not finish the run (hawk sky pic below).

Team Arducopter was the first entry and had a smooth and dramatic run, making  the first three corners well. Almost…

The team completed the course in 2:04 with a 30 sec time reduction for driving through the hoop!

Way to go team Autocrusher!

Boulder, CO

Cold weather and light snow hasnt deterred dedicated competitors and spectators from showing up at the 2011 Sparkfun AVC.Attached is the morning schedule. The first heat had several large ground vehicles, including a wheel chair equipped Dinosaur of the sorts, which almost immediately headed for the trees.…

Haven't seen this posted anywhere yet.

This is the current information and interim guidance on air traffic policies and prescribes procedures for the planning, coordination, and services involving the operation of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in the NAS.

It…

As I can see everyone liked the post of GliderUAV about automatic thermalling. I have tremendous interest in such things.

For a few month now I've been developing algorithms which will help our UAV's increase their flight times. And I've started to get some positive results.

Right now one algorithm has been already tested on x-plane HIL simulation, and I will say - it is…

Hello everyone,

After experimenting with tuning the APM, a friend (Roel Offermans) and I decided to implement telemetry. Even though it may seem counterintuitive to use a phone rather than an Xbee, when you already have the phone it saves some money. Another advantage is that it has 'unlimited' range,…

Check it out: an all-in-one telemetry kit for ArduPilotMega, all set up and ready to go! No more fussing around with Xbee configuration. $165 for the total, which includes the custom…

Airframe #2 - Decisions and path options

I decided to follow parallel paths to my goal.

The first path is to continue development on my own airframe.

The second path is to use an off the shelf airframe to work on the electronics end of my…

For my FPV projects I wanted a system that is easy to install in different vehicles. I always disliked that the FPV control of PAN/TILT systems used additional channels of my primary rc tx.

So I decided to build and integrated system that works independently from the RC and/or UAV setup. It should have and own…

As you all probably know, the Ardupilot/ArduIMU uses ADC  oversampling to achieve greater than 10 bit resolution of the internal ADC. I beleive they achieved alomost 12 bit resolution- not bad, I'd say.When I discovered this, I started using that approach to increase the resolution of cheap ADC's at…