Brendan Rackley's Posts (2)

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My UAV project in the works, pt. 2

Posted by Brendan Rackley on August 20, 2010 at 10:30pm


Hello all, (relative) newcomer here. I'm working on a FPV project with abit of a different control mechanism, that I hope to piece-by-piece get up to "UAV" status. Instead of a traditional RC TX/RX setup, I decided to go with a USB joystick ran through one of of sparkfun's USB host shields. This goes to an arduino, which does the USB processing and sends control commands over an Xbee. A picture is worth a thousand words:



What's inside the box, you may ask? Just an ATX power supply. Sadly, there wasn't even room for the arduino in there along with it... oh well.


Things are going well for my project though, and I hope to be putting in my order for the easystar sometime next week. Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.

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My UAV project in the works.

Posted by Brendan Rackley on August 4, 2010 at 4:33am
Hello all, newcomer here. I've been cobbling together some (mostly off the shelf) components together to make a FPV system, at least initially. Later on I plan on adding more goodies to get to "UAV" status, but for now it's all good.


Pictured is the mostly completed ground station, and some of the vehicle-side stuff.


The ground station consists of an Arduino mega, an SFE joystick shield, a Nokia 6100 LCD, and a cheap 4800 baud wireless serial modem, which is hidden behind the LCD. I plan on replacing the serial modem with an Xbee pro soon, but the TX/RX pair was only $10 total, so I figured it'd work for inital debugging and testing.


The plane components here are another arduino, with the wireless RX, elevator and rudder servos, and a 4DS TTL-level camera.


Everything works well, except for the camera. Hooked directly to the mega at 57600 baud and lowest RAW resolution, I averaged about 0.5 fps to the screen. I don't even what to think about what it would be like over a 4800baud connection, let alone an Xbee a hundred feet in the air. My question thus is - what would a good NTSC-output camera be, and what would be a good transmitter and receiver unit for that camera? The Xbee I plan on getting is 2.4ghz, so I would need something that would not interfere with that. Thanks!

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