My current project: a Large rover!  I have found a cheap dis-used electric wheelchair on eBay, removed the "chair" and all of the electronics, created a power distribution system behind the battery pack based around an arduino Uno, two 8 channel relay modules, and two 15A step-down converters for 12v and 5v.

On top I have replaced the chair with a aluminum frame where most of the 'higher' level electronics reside, currently this comprises of an Arduino due, a raspberry pi, 1TB Hard drive, a pair of 25A motor controllers, a uBlox GPS, a network hub, WiFi bridge and a USB Hub.

The plan is to use the Arduino DUE as the brains for the motor drive, it's managing the navigation and drive of both motors.  I plan to base the navigation around the 9DOF sensor pack I have added as a primary source of information, corrected by GPS & barometer for altitude.  I have a set of SR04 ultrasonic sensors that will provide a 'distance' measurement for navigation as well.

Once the basics have been sorted (ie navigation & drive) I have plans to interface the rover into a Kinect sensor; I have begun work on this already, however I require a fairly powerful computer for the image processing if I want to do 3D point cloud, navigation (damn hard), and person recognition as security for commands (nearly done).

For now, I just thought that I would share...

I copied this from a news article on nineMSN (link to article below)... Once again the key concern appears to be people looking into other peoples back yards... I haven't seen anyone draw attention to the potential danger in having a cowboy crash into a crowd, into traffic or destroy property... just record hi-res images of their p**ed off neighbor in their back yard...

For every mini drone that Australia's air safety watchdog knows about there are two that escape its notice.

Officials from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) told a Senate Estimates hearing on Wednesday how difficult it was to regulate drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that weigh less than seven kilograms and can be purchased easily online from overseas.

CASA director of aviation safety John McCormick told the hearing the commercial drone industry had doubled in the past year with licence holders jumping from 15 to 38.

There were also 12 applications in the pipeline.

They expect overall figures to double again next year.

Regulations are being reviewed.

He said current regulations did not envisage the explosion in numbers among the low weight octocopters that can be ordered online and sometimes carry high fidelity cameras.

There are privacy concerns that mini drones could be used to spy on people in their backyards.

"We are now looking at trying to regulate them," Mr McCormick said.

"I would dare say that for every UAS (unmanned aircraft system) we know exists there are most probably two that we don't know of."

Mr McCormick said the difficulty was that when someone reported the mini drones being flown, by the time CASA is able to get there, the person has gone.

"It's almost impossible to track who it is," he said.

CASA reviewing drones

In searching for sensors to use with the Arduino, looking for something new to play with I discovered a 16x4 Thermopile array, a bit of a search revealed a manufacturer that makes a 32x31 array, these may well be within the reach of the hobbyist, giving us a way to add thermal imaging to our copters.  Affordable thermal imaging would be a massive step forward for the civilian drone! 

Manufacturer Website

After tearing through countless quantities of landing legs on my drone I decided to make my own, somewhat stronger than the original legs.  Through years of modifying cars I have learnt (the hard way!!) that when you make something stronger, there's always something else in the chain that will fail.  So with this in mind I have designed these legs, and while they are a little rough at the moment (I only had hand tools at my disposal), they all but saved my copter last night in a crash from about 10ft caused by a short... 

The upper part, (copter is on it's back) is aluminium strapping with holes drilled from the original legs as a template, the lower part is a 10mm tube.  I've used two mounting holes in the tube, the top one I have used a steel screw, but to provide a suitable failure point, I use a plastic screw in the bottom hole and I've glued an 10mm LED in the bottom because I have a heaps of them and they are nicely rounded to prevent the landing gear digging into the ground.

When assembled they are nicely angled, typically they don't give much in a hard landing, but they worked brilliantly in an un-powered decent from well over 10ft onto concrete, resulting in absolutely no damage to the copter other than requiring four new plastic screws for the landing gear.  

OK, so I've got something of a dilemma... I want to upgrade my APM board as I'm still using APM1 with the analogue sensors, but I don't know if I should go with the AMP2.5 or with the PX4?

I was going to buy a new APM2.5 but I can't seem to find any that haven't already been pre-assembled or have been pre-assembled with side-entry pins, for some reason they all seem to be top entry!!  I'd have to completely re-jig my hexa to take a top mount board and honestly don't want to do that...  

Can someone tell me if the current/voltage sensor board is actually different to the APM1?  or can I adapt the APM1 board?

the alternative for me is to go with the PX4 board, I'd prefer this one as I think that as the Arducopter code develops it will require this kind of processing power to really shine, but at the moment I don't think that the code has been made public yet?  or is functional?  although the PX4 would compliment my upcoming ground station upgrade (I've got a couple of DUE boards winging their way over from china at this very moment!)

so chime in! let me know what you think!  I'll admit I'm not adverse to doing both, but I really need side mounted pins in the APM2.5 to use it, and I'm not re-working a top entry one while there's cold beer in the fridge and nice flying day's outside... 

WooHoo so I picked up my new ultrasonic sensors from my old workplace today!  that means it's time for me to start work on collision avoidance!! :-D  something I desperately need hahahaha...

first stage for me is to get the arduino uno reading the sensors, I might then set it up to talk to the ardupilot board on i2c and integrate the system from there...

Please forgive me for starting so many projects at once, but I want to make the most of my unemployment while I can!! great time to innovate and get all the ground work done before it gets slowed down by real work and earning a living ;-)

will keep everyone posted :-)

After a test flight yesterday where *everything* went wrong I thought that I would do some PID tuning in my back yard, while I might be a competent programmer, I'm pretty green, in fact, I aspire to be "green" when it comes to PID tuning!!

So to improve my PID tuning skills I've been running endless simulations and frankly they just do my head in, so I've hit it with some "trial and error" and thus far have improved on the standard set of PID's advertised on the jdrones website, and thought that I might publish them so that I can hopefully help at least one other person out there with a starting point for their hexa...

These are my settings for the jDrones Hexa 880kv motors w/ 12/4.5 props, runs on a pair of 3C 5000mah LiPo's and weighs in at 2.25kg in flight trim... I'd love any feedback from anyone running anything similar, please keep it similar tho, there's no use telling us all about your quad running 820's & weighing 1.5kg as that's not much good for the rest of us.

Altitude & throttle are close, but not perfect, Loiter & Nav need tuning so any input there would be great!!

Since I entered into the drone world I've had a problem with the concept of taking my laptop out into the field with me, but as a new (hopeless) pilot I would often like to know more about what's happening with my hexa as it's flying.  To solve this issue I got myself an Ardustation, only to find that it didn't have all the information on it that I was looking for, and the text screen, while great in sunlight left something to be desired...

So, I have started work on what I'd consider the 'Next Generation' of Ardustation, it's based on an Arduino 2560, and a 3.2" TFT Touchscreen...

I've included a GPS for local positioning and future (very near) "Follow Me" functionality, my plan is to pack as much functionality into the unit as I can so that out in the field we can all have a ground station that is more robust than a laptop but just as functional.

so far I have functions to change the mode, a basic HUD (this is limited by the processing power of the 2560 & bandwidth of the display interface), a Flight map, and some debugging code to view the data that is being received over the Xbee.

It should be mentioned that I've lifted some of the code from the Ardustation 2 software, but it has been largely modified by myself to collect more data and simplify program flow.

Let me know what you think?!  if there is enough interest in the project I will publish the code, parts list, and a concise 'how to' on constructing the unit.