Blogs

Hello guys!

We were fascinated by the idea of controlling a drone directly from Linux from the very beginning. Navio was created exactly with that purpose in mind. Your support let us finalize the hardware and get to running APM on Raspberry Pi with Navio. We have already showed our progress on drivers and making different parts work, but it was time to actually drive it. Seeing the thing finally make its first autonomous turns in an empty parking lot, even with not tuned PIDs is a large step forward in our project.

Many people already have received Navios and are looking forward to new possibilities with Linux based APM. We have prepared guides on proper setup of equipment:

• Getting started
  
• Hardware setup
• Building and running APM

Here’s the list of currently working features:

• Onboard IMU - MPU9250 
• Onboard barometer - MS5611
• Onboard magnetometer - AK8963 (as part of MPU9250)
• Onboard GPS - U-blox NEO-7M
• RC output using onboard PCA9685 PWM generator
• PPM input decoding using DMA GPIO sampling with pigpio library
• External GPS over UART
• External I2C magnetometer
• Telemetry over USB or UART or WiFi
• RGB status LED
• Voltage and current sensing with ADC (ADS1115)

Some of these are still in the prototype state, but we hope to finalize them soon. Thanks to the APM’s HAL all drivers are the same for Rover, Plane and Copter, so the first plane flight on Raspberry Pi with Navio is not far ahead - we’ll make it as soon as we do some additional testing with rover.

Special thanks to Andrew Tridgell and APM team for their help along the way.

Best regards, 

Emlid team

www.emlid.com