Has anyone here successfully built and flown a Paparazzi autopilot?

Comment by hotelzululima on May 25, 2008 at 3:06pm

Hi Chris,
what you observed is just the normal day to day flow of conversation of people on the bleeding edge.

And NO at the present time paparazzi is FAR from being available to "regular" folks and instead mostly employed by military and civilian UAV R&D teams.

Paparazzi at the present time is a project for people who have decided to make the commitment of time and energy and resources to overcome any shortfalls they may have of knowledge or experience and slog through the issues.

Is it a complete nightmare for non-technical folk? I would have to say that is an astute if unfortunate observation.

Papazzi is/was however the only flying example of an open source autopilot running on opensource operating systems with a practical chip implementation on ARM hardware.


As far as hardware availability on the 2.11 boards(I have MINE) and an earlier 1.1.3 board,
this has made it FAR easier to enter the paparazzi game.


Am I flying yet, unfortunately I havent had the time to dedicate to all this due to having to work a real job also.


so no not yet. :)



gwen hastings

Comment by Cole on May 25, 2008 at 3:35pm

A couple of years ago this was one of the few websites that had extinsive info on building a UAV. I remember looking through this site back then and I hated it with a passion. It was so hard to look at and the fact that it was written in lunix (the code, I mean) was more fuel for the fire. I do have to say that the hardware info was great though, and now their site is so much more user friendly.

Comment by Howard Gordon on May 25, 2008 at 3:50pm

Interesting thread. I think the main problem with the author's initial lack of familiarity with the ARM7 (along with lack of good project documentation on the subject), though he ultimately managed to overcome those startup issues. There are toolchains available for ARM7 on Windows as well as Linux, though I never had much luck running on the Mac. However, for this to be accessible to less technical users, someone is going to have to put a lot of work to pull all of the required software pieces together.

Comment by Boris Maryshev on May 26, 2008 at 1:13am

Paparazzi takes a little bit of semi-pro/academic approach to building things (after all guys behind it and main users are in education/research, just look at recent use of it in Arctic Sea on the wiki front page), which makes the learning curve quite steep.

On the other hand you actually learn something. What do you learn by using plug-and-play system like PicoPilot? Connecting few wires?

There's no reason why it shouldn't be possible to run it on Windows, there might be porting effort required, which is missing, well, because it is no-brainer getting linux up nowadays.

So I'm sticking with Paparazzi for now. The support will grow as more people are going to use it. There are several vendors of fully-assembled boards as well.

Comment by hovercycle on May 26, 2008 at 1:49am

I made my decision based on what I read...
I'm going to give this a serious shot!
Someone said lager planes are easier to control
with the software/sensor package that is paparazzi.
Well I want a bigger plane! so hopefully I can spend
less time trimming the software and servos.
p34c3

Comment by hotelzululima on May 26, 2008 at 3:01am

Hi Hovercycle,

you will make much more progress with paparazzi to simply buy one of the multiplex models for which an airframe file is available and do your first UAV based on that say something like the twinstar or funjet.

and with the availability of preassembled hardware paparazzi hardware is reduced to crimping a few wires(albeit with a 200.00 pair of crimpers.)

And should you take the approach of making molex to servo cable adapters you suddenly realize you have introduced 6 new possible points of failure into your systems per cable. or you can replace the wire going all the way to the servos.

You also become an afficando of teflon silver milspec wire for wiring harnesesses.
(latter can be found cheaply on ebay).

And if you want to do 900 mhz or other video legally(without interfering with your fast xbee 2.4ghz xceivers)(the 900mhz xbee so slow(9.6k)) you get to become a radio amateur.

keep in mind I am NOT complaining I got to root through all the paparazzi sources in the process and learned quite a bit.

kind regards
gwen

Comment by Howard Gordon on May 27, 2008 at 7:17am

"UPDATE: Speaking of Paparazzi, this Hong Kong company has fabbed thousands of Paparazzi PCBs (is the market for difficult-to-use open source autopilots really that big???) and has some very good deals on Tiny 2.11s ($185 for the kit including 4Hz GPS)]"

It looks like they are moving in the direction of building turnkey UAV systems, including the airframe. No doubt, the early versions will be rough around the edges, but don't be too surprised to see this type of configuration in the Tower Hobbies or Horizon Hobbies catalogs within 2 years.

The whole toolchain setup challenge is only relevant to users who want/need to modify firmware. In a turnkey system, the manufacturer can deal with the customization issues specific to a give airframe or set of airframes, and the user just needs to deal with a configuration menu.

Comment by Michael Evans on May 30, 2008 at 4:31pm

this guy is putting together a build log from start to finish. pretty much step-by-step instuctions and he sells all the paparazzi parts youll need here

www.onefastdaddy.com

http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=851820

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