I have heard from a few people who are very knowledgable about UAV's that they think its possiable to make your own autopilot using Old Phones(Ipod Touch's, Android Phones,IPhones) that you could with a lot of research and time make your own GPS based auto pilot. Any Info on this matter will be greatly appreciated.
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im setting up my first autopilot but with a twist all components are interchangeable as well as a connection to the old autopilot legacy to communicate to the controller you can check it out on my page and good luck with your show
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While the phones certainly have the processing power, the issue here is a matter of reverse engineering the phone. Being that Iphone hardware, even used, is the same price or more expensive than APM 2.0, I cannot see someone putting the massive amount of time into the coding and testing to make that work. Further, the phones don't have large numbers of digital outputs, so at best, we would get a serial output and then still require a microntroller to generate the signals to the ESCs or some wild custom ESC.
In all, the aproach is not very practical, will require an additional microcontroller anyway and likely would not be very successful.
I'm not saying it cannot be done, just I already see one limitation (all phones would require and external microcontroller) and at that point, why bother, when a working solution exists. Further, I don't think advocating turning a phone into an autopilot is something Homeland Security would feel comfortable with, let alone the phone manufacturers for liability reasons alone.