Comment by dionh on March 2, 2009 at 8:26am

I was looking at something similar Serial to WIFI
http://www.connectone.com/products.asp?did=73&pid=80
You can have bidirectional communication from your plane to your laptop or phone on the ground. The problem is distance, they are not as good as xbee but they have a lot more bandwidth. Latency will also be a factor if you want to do real-time computations.

3D Robotics Comment by Chris Anderson on March 2, 2009 at 10:43am

Yes, that's very similar to what we did with one of our first autopilots, which used a Windows Mobile phone and a servo-driver board. It did all the stuff you mention above, and the code is open source. It's all here.

In the end we got frustrated keeping up with the latest phone and OS models and abandoned the project. But perhaps it would make more sense now, with better phones and OSs.

Comment by Torin Segstro on March 2, 2009 at 10:44am

Is there no way to connect the Ardu to the smartphone directly. I would hate to have yet another transmitter on the plane.

3D Robotics Comment by Chris Anderson on March 2, 2009 at 10:56am

On our Windows Mobile phone, we just used the sync cable, which had serial lines. Perhaps modern phones do, too. But the main advantage of BT would be that you could program and otherwise set up the flight with the phone in your hand, and just place it anywhere in the plane when it's time to fly.

Comment by automatik on March 2, 2009 at 12:17pm

This certainly seems feasible especially with "smart phones" nowadays. iPhone and "Google phone" G1 come to mind as perhaps best candidates...and are perhaps more powerful then PDAs of last few years (people tried similar things with PDAs back then but they were "cluncky" and expensive in comparison). If I was to do this I would probably lean towards G1 (iPhone has SDK but it's somewhat limited) which runs on Android open platform software and is cheaper then iPhone.
On the top of my head there are two things that I would spend more time thinking of:
- I would prefer that everything on the plane has 'wired' connection, just less chances that something can go wrong... I am not sure how "legit" this argument is since bluetooth devices will be close to one another. Have to think more about it

- For the price of "smart phone" you can get a really nice SBC that has more functionality and options.
While SBC, imo, is a nice option, there are others in today's computing world. I recently got WiFi router (~$50 from ebay), installed Linux on it and now have very small yet powerful mobile computer powered from batteries(serial port, usb port, 4 ethernet connections, and wifi ofcourse). I interfaced it (HW and SW) with Audrino, put it on a RC car, added usb webcam, etc...Anyhow for ~$50 and a little work you get 7"x7"x1" computer...(might be a little big for rc uav though :) )

As Chris mentioned there is "ease of use" with smart phone where you can "do stuff" in the field and just plop it into uav, which is appealing. Also smart phones might be better supported then some of the stuff I mentioned which is another plus...Sounds like a fun project

Comment by Michal B on March 3, 2009 at 10:25am

automatik: many people probably already have capable phone, so the you don't need to count cost of a phone.
Frankly I didn't mean iPhone, this doesn't allow to be programmed in C/C++.

Another thing where mobile phone onboard would be useful is situation when the plane would get lost. It could send you SMS with last GPS coordinates, so that you can go and search it.

Today I solved serial over Bluetooth task, it works very nice! So at least telemetry to smart phone will be possible :)

Comment by Erik J on March 3, 2009 at 4:33pm

There are people using Openmoko as robotics brain on a boat. He is using the old H/W the new version has a devboard that breaks out lots of usefull stoff for you, though it's very expensive

I've heared in that project they are moving away from phones to Laptops because they need more CPU power.

Comment by OlivierD. on March 3, 2009 at 6:40pm

Michal B : There is this gizmo too, a bit pricy but seems capable :
http://www.toradex.com/En/Products/Limestone_PDA_Kit
and the micro motherboards they make too sound interesting:
http://www.toradex.com/En/Products/Robin_Z530_Z510

Comment by Jamie on March 3, 2009 at 10:11pm

Hey automatik, would you be able to give more details on how you installed linux on your router and what distribution(s) of linux can be used etc. It sounds interesting :)

Comment by Michael King on March 4, 2009 at 12:11pm

I gave this idea alot of thought as I program for windows mobile. There is a definate huge advantage to flying a cell phone. in fact, a small sensor board would be all that was needed to cover turn and roll rate and airspeed. The internal GPS of my phone would handle the gps portion of the equation. The UAV can fly well on just PIDs without a whole lot of gyros.

This would be a cool project! imagine an autopilot being just a download away!

Comment

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• Next ›
• Page