Came across this very interesting article on the register

"A British-led Japan-based group is building a free-software-powered flying robot for use by disaster relief organisations – and at its heart is tech darling the Raspberry Pi.

There are lots of uses for the £30 Pi, from an educational device to a media player, if you can get hold of one of the boards. OpenRelief is planning something rather more ambitious: to use the credit card-sized computer as the brain of an autonomous flying drone – not as a killer robot, for once, but to help save lives instead."

More of the article http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/12/raspberry_pi_drone/

 Decided to write up about my experience in building my lastest multicopter, a 3dr hexa. The lessons learned from the exercise include

1. Check before you start , that you have all the screws  and spacers are available.
2. Decide on what flight controller you are planning to use.
3. Start your build early enough, so that you could catch some sleep.

 I should thank the 3dr folks again for the awesome work they have done. The build was straight forward, the only challenge was that once i opened the box, and laid out the contents, I realised that some nuts and spacers were missing. This lead to my next lesson, given i had promised myself to take the hexa for test flight next day, my choices were limited, cannibalise an already assembled 3dr quadcopter and hexacopter ( from quadframe) or not to build. So I decided to proceed and strip my 3dr (from fully build to mere frame and bits missing) and took my (qaudframe) hexa to parts.

The next one to make my mind up on which flightcontroller to choose. I had a choice of six in front of me, mk,uavp, st32, APM1.4, hoverfly and APM2.Again, this goes back to lesson number 3, the later in the night the hazier your brain becomes. Finally i decided to go for the APM2. The final result of this build defenitely shows the signs of non functioning brain.

The folks MAVlab team from the Delft University, faculty of aerospace engineering, have been actively involved in the paparazzi community. They have been part of the the paparazzi community since 2006 and have different MAV projects running in the lab. The subjects of thier projects have covered a very wide range: From swarming over autonomous spot landing, Hybrid uav`s (quads with wings), flapping wing (www.DelFly.nl), fixed wing, rotary wing, electronics (yapa, imu`s), control and filtering software, vision algorithms, indoor operation,..

To strengthen the knowledge/expertise in thier lab they are looking to good people to do join for phd on MAV`s. If someone is actively involved in MAV`s have a master degree in engineering, computer science, computer vision. Please contact them with your cv to microuav@gmail.com. Please do include information (pictures, youtube movies) on MAV related project`s.

Thanks to Martin, we had an awesome Drone Zone meet up in UK at Charter house http://www.charterhouse.org.uk/. It brought together folks from different parts of UK and Eoin flying in from Ireland. The geekiest of us were drawn towards Pete's UAV Dev board running HIL on X-planes.

Other things of geeky interest include Colin's custom build Groundcontrol station among all the quad's, hexa's, Octo's and traditional planes and heli's.

The afternoon went too fast for anyone to notice, with all the drones taking to the air. Again the thing that struck  most of us who were there, was the enthusiasm, knowledge and expertise that DIYDrone community created. I hope there would be more of such meet ups and some of the crazy ideas that folks get around to discussed get followed up. So that  we could have more new stuff to chat around :).

Thanks to Chris, according to many who had been at Number Twelve yesteraday was a very interesting meetup. One of the rare one's where you talk about everything from UAV's to how UAV's could be used to monitor eggs in bird's nest to export regulation of UAV's.