Merry Christmas and happy new year DIYdrones! It is been long since my first blog post about my time in jDrones. Sorry guys I haven’t posted since then, even I said I would. Been busy finishing my degree and with my projects.
I recently recorded a video of one of our projects here. We’re doing some research on how we could build stand alone virtual horizon/attitude detector to use in gliders and other flying vehicles. This very early version is running on Ardustation Mega. This screen is way too rough to draw nice graphics, but good enough to determine algorithms to draw the horizon lines, speedmeter and variometer of the aircraft.
Final version will have built in GPS, gyro/accelerometer, barometer and other necessary stuff for fully stand alone operation to support flying.
What kind of a information do you think this kind of a display should provide?
Hello guys and girls. I am new here and I wanted to take time to introduce myself for the community and to tell you little bit of my first steps at jDrones.
I am soon to be graduated electrical and electronics engineer and Jani offered me a change for training here at his company. I am total newbie to UAVs. I have no previous experience in UAVs so everything is pretty new for me, but I have been working with some robotics projects at uni before using PIC controllers and IMU sensors. Here is a sample of one of our projects we designed and built from the scratch with my friends. Balancing Ball Bot. It is a bit wobbly as we run out of time from tuning the control loop better before the submission deadline.
Lets talk abit about drones. First of all wow! It has been overwhelmingly confusing, rewarding and FUN to see and to work with the stuff that you guys have developed!
Arduino world takes a bit time for me to adjust with all the libraries handling many of the things that one has to write in the code by themselves with many other controllers.
I have been working with jDrones heavy duty antenna tracker for the past week now. It is based on ArduStation Mega. It listens MAVlink telemetry to calculate correct tilt and heading for the antenna. Existing software for ArduStation is handling many of the things already. Modifying this software for our antenna tracker is very challenging for me. Thousands and thousands of lines of code! Getting to see the antenna turn and follow the drone just feels so nice after all the hard work. There is still lots of work to do with the tracker tho. I had lots of difficulties of understanding MAVlink messages, and how the protocol works. We want to catch MAVlink messages with the tracker and forward them to USB for Mission Planner usage, so you could use the antenna tracker stand alone or as an extension for Mission Planner.
It is been truly fun and I have already learned lots of new things. I am looking forward of sharing the projects and ideas here at DIYdrones.
If you guys have any advises or recommendations for must see videos or must read books for UAV hobbyist I would be happy to hear. Also if you know some helpful articles or websites that you think are good for newbies to study, please let me know! I plan to write once in a while about my time, confusion, difficulties and success at jDrones. If you have any questions or comments let me know!
