I'm interested in simulating the flight of a copter as the QuadHil tutorial demonstrates, but I want to use it either without any hardware in-the-loop or with a small Arduino in-the-loop. The idea is to use the firmware of ArduCopter together with a simulated physical environment (FlightGear) and with or without APM Planner. But I want to do it without any more hardware (I also have an Arduino board which I could use instead).
Anyone who's played around with this software more than I care to share how difficult this would be, and how I might go about it?
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So I think what you're trying to do is run the APM software on a board other than the APM.
The "simulated physical environment" part is what the current HIL stuff does (i think). I believe it takes the attitude, altitude, etc from flight gear and creates fake sensor values and passes these to the APM firmware. Then APM produces the output to the engines/servos and that's fed back into the flight controls of flighGear.
I think it'll be tough. APM/ACM runs right at the limits of the Atmega 1280 or 2560 boards so if you're using something with less sram or flash space for the code you'll run into difficulties.
-Randy