Hi.I'm planning to make my own autopilot delta flying wing and I would just like to know if it's possible to have a live data link to my laptop for realtime telemetry and if i wanted, to update the waypoints.My end project will (hopefully) be a high altitude photography platform launched from a balloon at about 90 - 100k feet. As I live in the UK there aren't many expanses of open land for a safe landing and retrieval so having a plane return to the launch site is what I'm aiming for.Also, is it possible to use the Ardupilot on a paraglider type of airframe?Thanks for any help :)
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@Reto
In your setup, I don't think that you have to disconnect GPS from Arduino when uploading sketches - at least I didn't have to in my setup (and that made it so much easier and nicer :) ) - note I was doing this on Arduino board and not on ArduPiolt board so there might be difference. Sketches are being uploaded on the main serial port, and GPS is connected to completely different port so there shouldn't be any collisions.
(there is no "Reply to This" under you last post so I "sending" this under main topic...)
I was part of a team that did a test like this out of Oregon, back in 2002. We went up that high to match the Mach number and Reynolds number we were expecting to see at Mars during our airplane's critical transition from being folded into an entry capsule to level flight over Mars. I wasn't involved in any of the technical work that went into the test. I was more of a technical liaison between the scientists and the engineers on that team.
There is an animation below the videos that shows how the vehicle folds up to go into the capsule. In the drop test video, just before the drop, you are looking up at the balloon from a small camera on the tail (which is folded under like a lobster's tail). It was about 2:00 PM, but the sky is black up there. As soon as it is released, the tail unfolds and a few seconds later, the wings deploy. After that, you'll see it swing back and forth until the small drogue chute is cut loose and the airplane is able to freefall and transition from a vertical dive to a shallow climb. The autopilot climbs for a little while to bleed off the excess energy from the drop.
There are a lot of non-standard problems when you try to get an vehicle to fly at that altitude. The air that high is very, very cold and it is about 1% of sea level density. This means that between the time when our vehicle was released and when it started its 3g pull-up, it had accelerated to about Mach 0.7. So aerodynamically, things are pretty different. The air is so thin you have to go very fast to generate enough lift to fly level and it is easy to get into a transonic flow regime. I think that one of the videos shows a high altitude turn and you can see how slow the heading changes, even with a 45 deg bank angle. You can also have issues with batteries and electronics (you may want to look at the many amateur high altitude balloon projects on the web) and I seem to remember that "normal" GPS units at the time were not meant to work reliably at physical altitudes above 60,000 ft, so we had to buy a more expensive GPS that was certified to our altitude. The balloon took about 90 minutes to get to altitude and the aircraft took about 90 minutes to make it back to the launch site. Sorry about the videos being so small, but back in the old days we worried a lot about bandwidth.
It sounds like you have a really fun project to work on! I look forward to seeing where you go with it.
Alex, you can start with this link: http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/adding-wireless-telemetry-to
You can use XBEE in europe but it would have to be the non 900 Mhz models.
You can probably use ArduPilot and a paraglider, whatever means it uses to turn, assign that servo to the relevant port on the ArduPilot, I don't see why not.
Replies
In your setup, I don't think that you have to disconnect GPS from Arduino when uploading sketches - at least I didn't have to in my setup (and that made it so much easier and nicer :) ) - note I was doing this on Arduino board and not on ArduPiolt board so there might be difference. Sketches are being uploaded on the main serial port, and GPS is connected to completely different port so there shouldn't be any collisions.
(there is no "Reply to This" under you last post so I "sending" this under main topic...)
Here is a web page that describes some aspects of the test: http://marsairplane.larc.nasa.gov/reliability_2.html
There are some videos of the test here: http://marsairplane.larc.nasa.gov/multimedia.html#videos
There is an animation below the videos that shows how the vehicle folds up to go into the capsule. In the drop test video, just before the drop, you are looking up at the balloon from a small camera on the tail (which is folded under like a lobster's tail). It was about 2:00 PM, but the sky is black up there. As soon as it is released, the tail unfolds and a few seconds later, the wings deploy. After that, you'll see it swing back and forth until the small drogue chute is cut loose and the airplane is able to freefall and transition from a vertical dive to a shallow climb. The autopilot climbs for a little while to bleed off the excess energy from the drop.
There are a lot of non-standard problems when you try to get an vehicle to fly at that altitude. The air that high is very, very cold and it is about 1% of sea level density. This means that between the time when our vehicle was released and when it started its 3g pull-up, it had accelerated to about Mach 0.7. So aerodynamically, things are pretty different. The air is so thin you have to go very fast to generate enough lift to fly level and it is easy to get into a transonic flow regime. I think that one of the videos shows a high altitude turn and you can see how slow the heading changes, even with a 45 deg bank angle. You can also have issues with batteries and electronics (you may want to look at the many amateur high altitude balloon projects on the web) and I seem to remember that "normal" GPS units at the time were not meant to work reliably at physical altitudes above 60,000 ft, so we had to buy a more expensive GPS that was certified to our altitude. The balloon took about 90 minutes to get to altitude and the aircraft took about 90 minutes to make it back to the launch site. Sorry about the videos being so small, but back in the old days we worried a lot about bandwidth.
It sounds like you have a really fun project to work on! I look forward to seeing where you go with it.
http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/adding-wireless-telemetry-to
You can use XBEE in europe but it would have to be the non 900 Mhz models.
You can probably use ArduPilot and a paraglider, whatever means it uses to turn, assign that servo to the relevant port on the ArduPilot, I don't see why not.