Comment by James F. on February 2, 2011 at 2:04pm

How did you manage to cut CF with a laser cutter? What laser cutter did you use?

Comment by DaveyWaveyBunsenBurner on February 2, 2011 at 3:19pm

Hi Ritchie,

I think this is exactly what Im looking for but do you have a diagram of the built mount?

Cheers!

Comment by DaveyWaveyBunsenBurner on February 2, 2011 at 4:17pm

Thats an amazing coincidence Ritchie, I've spent today designing almost exactly this! I want to be able to swing an FPV camera over the nose of an Easystar and back up for landing. Anyway I shall PM you!

Comment by Ritchie on February 2, 2011 at 4:35pm

Laser cutter is a friends in a school, 100w is all I actually know.

@DaveyWaveyBunsenBurner

No idea of it built unless you call my idiot scribble a diagram.

The pan and tilt is pretty much the same as everyone elses (meaning the code can be used with everyone elses - except pan and tilt channels may need to be switched).

It is your retraction method that will be hard. I built mine to be a cuboid shape so I can cut the plane to shape easily. The two square-ish bits glue to the servo back and the airframe and after that its just round bits in round holes square bits in square holes.

I'll post pictures in the initial post of it on the plane once its done.

Developer Comment by Randy on February 2, 2011 at 4:52pm

Ha! I like your comment about "Save as draft" = publish immediately.  That happened to me about a week ago with my mouse sensor post.  I saved it, then immediately went to bed and to my horror the next morning found my half-finished blog was out there..

Comment by Jay Land on February 2, 2011 at 4:56pm

Great project.... have you thought about having the GCS send commands to the mount in flight? Also what about using the mount and aircraft position data to caculate the location of an object you are viewing and being able to pass that data to the autopilot to "track to" or orbit over.

 

I am still in the baby steps for programming but would love to help if I can.

 

Good luck.

Comment by Ritchie on February 2, 2011 at 6:33pm

@Randy :D

@Jay Land GCS commands is probably out of my league but Jason, Doug et al could probably knock it up in a few minutes being the genuises (is that right plural :D) that they are. The distance calculation is converting the location data into metres or feet which I have no idea how to do but the data is all the easily enough.

Thanks to some forward planning servos can be reversed and scaled. While the data used conforms to standard APM style and so has all the information similar ones have (all locations have lat, lon and alt etc). Thinking about Happy's awesome work I made sure to use separate variables where I could so uploading only needs to go to one place to change the focus (GPS_mark - imaginative name huh). Also the retraction happens automatically below 20m above home location.

Comment by Jay Land on February 3, 2011 at 12:38am

I have an app on my DroidX that allows me to take a picture of an object and it will tell me the height. With the right info it would make a good tool for the GCS software..... My hampster is really turning......

Comment by Ritchie on February 3, 2011 at 3:52am

As I said the data is all there easy enough, its just the conversion of units (which you don't need always). You could conceivably add the GPS mark data to the telemetry stream too but I'd rather let one of the big bosses do that as it would mean adding bits to already functioning APM stuff (unlike this which is completely new code so doesn't interfere).

Developer Comment by Doug Weibel on February 3, 2011 at 8:22am

Ritchie,

 

I am just starting to sip my first cup of coffee of the morning, but....  Your code does not appear to account for the roll, pitch or yaw (heading) of the airframe.  Without compensation for roll and pitch it cannot do a very good job of tracking a target.  Without compensation for yaw of the airframe it is useless.  Perhaps you are doing something with PITCH_CENTER that is not shown above?.  You should take a look at the work Pete Hollands did for the UAVDevBoard and the work Joe Holdsworth is doing for APM.

Comment

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next ›
• Page