We've recently made the move from the old clunky DCM implementation to a new Quaternion approach, and it seems to perform better, or at least the code is much smaller and takes almost no time at all to execute on our 72MHz 32-bit flight controller. I'll be writing an article on the Quaternion method as part of our series on Engineering Insights.

We've also added MAVLink support, and full integration with QGroundControl GCS.  This helps greatly with debugging, and of course enables…

Video of ROFL Tuning Session with spectacular crash when we deliberately detune one of the PID values! No quadcopters harmed (much) in the making of this video.  Video of stable flight below.

By the way, the ROFL quadcopter kit is still on sale on my website:…

Seraphim is our sensor board for the quadcopter, it includes accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, barometer, GPS and micro-SD card slot.  With the exception of the GPS unit, all of these components are a complete pain in the backside to solder properly, and there are some consequences of not…

Here you can see the little guy we have just begun to use and will be releasing for sale in early October. The black Forebrain board is what was running the autopilot code in ROFL up till now, 72MHz ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller, measures 66mm*23mm.  The longer Hivebrain board is what we will switch to and will…

Well, after a rather merry holiday in Scotland I'm back and will be posting a load of development videos (mainly of ROFL) for those that are interested. This is our first attempt at flying outdoors in the night. Actually this is the first time I have ever tried to fly a model outdoors at night, it takes a little getting used to, all your old reference…

As with any inventor, designer or engineer, things don't always go my way!

Actually as it turns out, I did not damage the Seraphim prototype, but did destroy the reciever! That cheered me up a bit as we have much more need for the Seraphim rather than the reciever at the moment, I have spare of the latter.

Nonetheless, the lesson…

So, a month or so ago I told people about the crazy Talon airframe I had built and wanted to try and fly:

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/what-have-i-been-up-to-since-i?xg_source=activity

Well, now I have it flying!!

I have written a…

More information on all the projects I'm working on can be found at my website: www.universalair.co.uk

As you may or may not remember I hadn't got my crazy experimental airframe flying (Talon:…

When I first got interested in UAVs I took the advice of some of the forum members here and equipped myself with arduino based systems....but I'm a crazy engineer and this approach didn't last long before I had convinced myself I could make a better job of all this if I started from scratch...luckily I also managed to…