Today i flew my Blade MSR using a joystick, my PC, and the 2.4ghz LP4DSM transmitter which used to be in the tx controller. The serial protocol is best documented here, but information on this exists elsewhere including here in a few posts, on diydrones. I'm pretty excited that I finally got this working...it took a few nights of serious head scratching to work out some kinks.

I used a USB to TTL breakout board to transmit to the LP4DSM module, which apparently is a pretty common module found in numerous spektrum and other transmitters. I used LabVIEW to assemble all of the code, pulling axis information from the joystick, filtering this data, and converting that into hexadecimal PPM which was sent via serial to the TX.

I still have some bugs to work out, but it worked, and that is progress.

So, while I was working on this, I also bought an Arduino Pro Mini (yes, i gave into the temptation of a $20 already tested, super small, and assembled board :-D ) and an "ArduIMU Sensor Board - Six Degrees of Freedom (Main)". I put the board name in " " because it's actually only 4 degrees of freedom, having a 3 axis acc and a 1 axis gyro, with analog output.

It doesn't come with any documentation (nor does the Arduino Pro Mini), and I'm not sure if that is common or not. There is online documentation for the Arduino Pro Mini, which is helpful, but I find the information here on DIYdrones to be the best resource. thankfully the hardware is somewhat self explanatory.

Lastly, I bought two micro servo boards, which are the same servos on the Blade MSR, and the BMCX, and possibly others. i'll have to post the name/details of those servos later, i can't find the info right now.

My plan is to put both boards on my MSR, to make a stabilized camera mount using my endoscope vid camera. You can see where this is going.... :-D

....pull off the 5 in 1, add 2 more servos and a rx, and I should have a blade MSR that can be video camera flown, flight stabilized, and hopefully very, very cool. (and hopefully light enough!)

Lesson learned: don't try to wire small circuitry at 11pm at night. Last night I received a small CMOS video camera + transmitter combo (2.4 ghz LTS wireless camera) and put it on my E-Flight Blade MSR. I was actually able to lift this + battery, although it was certainly struggling. However before I could record any video, I managed to cross the positive and negative wires on the battery, and I fried a capacitor and possibly a majority of the circuitry on the 2.4ghz camera transmitter board.

So, results are in: Yes my Blade MSR can lift this rather large camera + battery, and no, the camera does not like it when you feed positive 9volts into the transmitter ground. I'm going to see if I can get a replacement surface mounter capacitor, but frankly, I think this may not be fixable :-(. Either way I'm no longer going to wire circuitry at night when I'm tired.

On a better note, check out these cool pictures from the board!

Above: identical capacitor (that IS a capacitor, right?) to the one I fried. I need to ID this...

Above: Camera on left (backside of CMOS board, and crispy 2.4ghz tx on right)

Above: CMOS

Above: CMOS zoomed in. glass is not very clean.....

Above: CMOS, focal point is on circuitry under the glass

Above: even closer

I just bought a wireless camera for my micro heli E-Flight Blade MSR. More on this below....

Before I try to make my own scratch built MAV, I'm going to experiment with a few easier projects. (BTW everyone, my future MAV is heading more towards a quadcopter...you can say "I told you so")

The above picture is a LTS LTCMW203E1, which is a 2.4 ghz wireless video camera (CMOS). It's arriving tonight, and I hope to tear it down to the board and pop it on my micro heli Blade MSR and hope that it's light enough to fly. I don't expect great results from this, as I'm not really interested in POV (point of view) flying a Blade MSR, but it's a start. I read a lot of concerns about using 2.4ghz transmitters interfering (or receiving interference) from the 2.4ghz system on the MSR, but I've also been told that they work fine. So I guess I'm going to just try it and see what happens. If I had a choice I would have gone w/ 900mhz, but long story short I'm taking a chance and will share my results.

On another note, I am concurrently working on interfacing my transmitter from my RTF blade MSR kit w/ my PC. I've been following the same procedure from http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=721024 , and am hoping to be able to read the DSM2 serial tonight. I have been pulling out my hair because for the past few nights I was trying to monitor the serial transmissions without level shifting (I did not realize that microchips speak in 0 - 3.3volt, while my PC RS232 is looking for higher voltage than that, so I need to make a circuit to bump up the voltage in the signal coming from the transmitter). Whoops!! I'll breadboard one tonight and hopefully i should be able to read the serial no problem. Once I can read, writing a program to write the DSM2 serial in LabVIEW shouldn't be too bad, and then I'll use my joystick ( Saitek x45 ) to control my Blade MSR.

Sooooo long story short, once I get the above to work (cross fingers), I'll throw an accelerometer on my Blade MSR w/ a tiny simple transmitter, and experiment with flight stabilization. this is all to help me understand the basics, so I can try to tackle more complex projects like my scratch built MAV.

Rotors pitched to induce nose-up pitch and counter-clockwise yaw

I am beginning to think that this is do-able. it looks very heavy, and i need to do the math to figure out how much thrust I can get out of my brushed motors. I reduced rotor diameter, added a horizontal stab, and added a canopy so it looks more fly-able.

The fun part is almost over, as I need to start diving into the math to make sure this will fly.