Mark Richardson's Posts (2)

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Flying with our new controller

The last week or so we've spent porting a version of the AeroQuad AQ32Plus code over to run on the AshimaCore board. One of our goals has been to get a common board that can run (or has the hooks put in place to run) several of the more popular open source flight controllers. Here's some video (why did we do this at night?) of us flying on our own old aluminum frame and on a couple of different Turnigy quad frames (nothing crazy, just hovering mainly):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dh2J_XQBqY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwBLNYVLvV0

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ARM Control Board / Flight Computer

P3284930.jpg?width=750

I wanted to share with you a board that a couple of us have been working on for the last few months. We put it together to be an easy-to-access ARM Cortex-M4F flight controller. We also got a little frustrated with the STM peripherals library, so we've been building out a c++ object peripherals library that's open source with a nice, flexible expat license. Let me know if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions!

Library: https://github.com/ashima/embedded-STM32F-lib

Board info (and lots of other random stuff): http://ashimadevices.com 

Here's some info on the board. In the image, above, there are two prototypes we made, top has a XBee and the programmer / power board attached. The bottom has the two boards separated and the XBee removed.

Physical Specs: 

main board - 64mm x 35mm; 15g; 3.3v in (5v tolerant I/O)

programmer / power board - 27 mm x 35 mm; 7g; 6-20v in / 3.3v and 5v out

Processor: 168 MHz 32-bit Cortex-M4F (FPU); 1Mb Flash; 192K SRAM; 5v tolerant I/O; 14 timers; CRC and RNG units; 96 bit unique ID; RTC calendar; I2C, SPI, USART I/O; USB; 3 ADC, 1 DAC

IMU: MPU 9150 - board centered with colocated mag, gyro and accel; BMP180 pressure (MS5611 ready, but these parts have been hard to source)


Support components: A high-speed 4-bit SDIO micro-SD card slot for logging. 8 Kbytes of EEPROM on the board. For testing and quick board state assessment, we included 3 user and 4 status LEDs. There's also a 1W audio amp in lieu of a buzzer.

Comms: XBee module (or XBee compatible) ready

Programming: The USB interface is broken-out via the power board specifically to allow development and programming.

Control: We put a host of the usual I/O on the board. Here's a break out diagram:

AABoardPinOut.png?width=600

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