Hey all, I just wanted to remind everyone the MAVBoard Indiegogo Campaign is ending in less than 5 days. It is just shy of half way meeting its goal, but its a flex funding campaign, so everyone will get their boards regardless. But if you would like one in the initial batch, now is the time to get one!

I recently decided I was going to do all my own SMD assembly for the boards. I bought an arduino based reflow oven, and did a trial run batch of boards the other day. 

Here is a peek at my assembly station:

The resulting boards look fantastic (see picture at top)

Full details have been posted to the Indiegogo updates page.

I have also started to port the Teensy code to the MAVBoard pro to support native telemetry display on the Taranis RC transmitter. I have a few MAVLink variables showing up, so its just a matter of cleaning up the code, and getting the remaining pieces of data into the serial stream. My OpenLRSng just showed up as well, so that will be next after the Taranis.

Thanks to everyone who has already backed the project! 

I have finally got the MAVBoard to a state where I am ready to take pre orders via Indiegogo! After several revisions of the boards, I am quite happy with them and would like to take pre orders so I can get a large batch of them made.

Here is the description of the MAVBoard from the campaign:

The MAVBoard is a way to share a single MAVLink telemetry connection (the telemetry port on a 3D Robotics APM 2.X, for example) among multiple devices, such as OSDs, telemetry radios, telemetry converters or other add-on boards. Until now, the solution is to create a custom soldered cable harnesses which are difficult to make and not as flexible, since only one device can be connected to the "Tx" pin of the MAVLink connection.

I ended up splitting the design into two models: MAVBoard Lite and MAVBoard Pro. The Lite board has no AVR chip, and is simply a bus for MAVLink connections, with a jumper to select the Tx device. The Pro board contains the AVR to do telemetry conversion, as well as has several digital and analog pins (including the ones for I2C) available at the edge of the board. The board is all SMD-component based now, and the size has shrunk quite a bit from the first prototype I announced last year.

I am hoping to get at least 100 in the pre-order, but I plan to make more than that. If you sell drone/multi-rotor parts online and would be interested in stocking the MAVboards, let me know.

So, with that, please checkout the campaign and support it if this project would be useful to you!

All feedback is welcome!

Someone's having a little fun in the bay area.

According to this Bay Area CBS Article:

Several signs have cropped up on Bay Area highways, telling drivers that drones are enforcing speed limits. The California Highway Patrol told KPIX 5 the signs are fakes and that they do not have drones.

But not to worry:

Barclay said the agency does not have the unmanned aircraft.

“At CHP we definitely do not have drones. We use radar, lidar, pace, we have planes and we have helicopters, but we do not have drones,” he said. “Along with not having drones we definitely do not have any drones that would fire any type of weaponry.”

I've been working on a custom circuit board I am calling the "mavboard" which will be a board that will distribute telemetry connections to various other devices, and allow you to select which port gets the telemetry Rx pin, since only one thing can talk *TO* the APM telemetry port. All other mav ports can sniff the APM Tx pin.

As you can see in the images below, I went a step further and embedded an ATMega directly into the board as well. My vision for this board is not just a "Mavlink Hub" but also a protocol translator for a couple of popular RC Rx devices that offer telemetry options such as FrSky and OpenLRS. What I have working so far is the FrSky conversion originally based from JDrone's jD_IOBoard_FrSkyMAVLink project with refactoring and bug fixes from Vito Ammirata. We have been discussing and making progress over in This Thread and his updated code has been put into GitHub.

When done, all the board design files and schematic will be available for download. The initial prototype is using a number of through-hole components which I would like to switch out to SMD so the board can be smaller (shooting for size of MinimOSD), but I am still exploring options for how to get a small number of SMD boards stuffed without having to hand solder all the components. If interested, I may offer some up for sale so I can get a batch of them made.