Peter Seddon's Posts (9)

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"Things are looking up for eyes in the skies"

Posted by Peter Seddon on March 23, 2012 at 2:00am

This headline appears in The Times newspaper, published in London, on Friday 23 March in a feature about the growth of US police forces using unmanned aircraft. (Although the article is behind a paywall, it is reprinted in the Australian here). The article goes on to mention diydrones.com as the 'leading website for enthusiasts.. for a growing army of amateurs who are building drones fitted with autopilot systems...'. It charts the development of small drones for a variety of applications and sights their use to replace humans for dull, dirty and dangerous jobs. 

AerVironment gets a mention and a video of its Cube foldable multicopter and there is a quote from Peter W.Singer of the Brooking Institution.

Peter

 

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HexRotor

Posted by Peter Seddon on November 24, 2010 at 8:12am

Came across this in the Science Museum London as a development by Manchester University. It looked like the motors are fixed at this angle - Why? Anyone suggest any benefits for this arrangement - faster yaw control? greater stability? more controllable?


Peter

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ArduOktoKopter Flies

Posted by Peter Seddon on November 8, 2010 at 9:00am
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I have just tried my Oktokopter on its second flight (despite the wind and light rain that made it a very short flight) and it seems flyable. When the weather calms down I will give it a longer flight and try and shoot some video.

Here are some brief details:
KDA20-22L motors, Turnigy 30A ESC's converted to I2C, APC 10 x 4.7 props, UBEC, GWS RX8 receiver, 10mm sq aluminium frame with pcb central hub and mounting plates

RC1 code modified to add I2C motor control and mixertable for controlling 8motors. ArduOktoKopter.zip


Peter
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Panther UAV

Posted by Peter Seddon on October 22, 2010 at 8:00am
This is a recent video of the IAI Panther UAV


that combines vertical take off with conventional fixed wing flight. This video is apparently of the miniPanther weighing 12kg and with 2hour endurance.

Peter
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Which Ublox GPS?

Posted by Peter Seddon on August 11, 2009 at 3:05am
Came across this post on the Mikrokopter forum and wondered how this might affect the Ardupilot fitted with the Ublox LEA5-H: " we did our tests with the LEA5H to use it with the NaviCtrl. We couldn't find a solution to get it work. The data rate of the LEA5 is not constant. (depends on how many satelites are received). Statement from ublox: this is a typical behavior, if you use refresh rates below 1 Hz.This is the reason, why we use the LEA4H for our MKGPS.So - LEA5H is not recommended to use together with the NaviCtrl."The NaviCtrl is an ARM based navigation/data logging board with GPS.regards Peter
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Features for next version of Ardupilot

Posted by Peter Seddon on August 1, 2009 at 6:39am
Developing and especially testing hardware and software is never easy and by opening the process to others, solutions can often be identified very quickly and development move on more quickly.I don't know how you went about developing the A/Pilot and I couldn't find any threads about future features so excuse me if I am talking out of turn but I and I am sure others would like to be involved in the process in terms of features for the next version, writing code and testing. Would that be practical?So here is a feature I would like to see:A setup facility for the A/Pilot so that parameters could be configured in an application that then get uploaded to say the EEPROM. I have trouble tweaking about with the source code to make parameter changes (it is too easy to change the wrong parameter).regards Peter
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