For all the talk of the drone revolution, there remanes but 1 vehicle which is truly a plug & play drone for the masses: the AR Drone. In true dot com tradition, ifixit.com made zillions of dollars in venture capitol & never did a teardown of the 2.0, so it was time for the unemployed masses to step in.
The entire electronics assembly & battery are supported by a piece of foam. The boards still have many wires connecting to the frame, subjected to the full vibration.
A common 640x480 camera does the optical flow & seems to send some kind of compressed data. It may be a 30fps USB cam.
A custom AR Drone sonar circuit.
It's a mane brain board & sensor board, connected by
just 8 pins. The 2 cameras connect to the mane board. The front cam may output uncompressed data.
A common PIC serializes the data from all the sensors. Maybe it also fuses the sensor data.
The air pressure sensor is under a piece of foam designed to not touch it.
Standard gyro + accelerometer chip & unknown magnetometer, not that it matters since everyone is going to use the mpu9250 tomorrow.
The radio
with a trace antenna.
Under the can, it's a power management & USB chip from TI, some kind of flash & RAM from Micron. In usual modern fashion, the mane processor would be sandwiched under the big chip, so there would be no way to see it.
The 1st test ever done to see how accurately the optical flow holds its position. Over carpet, it's hopeless & seeks the nearest line. With a target, it's decent at the default altitude, but slips off at higher altitude. As soon as it slips over carpet, the altitude reading goes high & it descends. It could be improved with more software.
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