I just did a quick demo video to show Arducopter 3.0.1 flying a large electric heli.  This is my new GreyHawk Maxi development frame.  Loosely based on TRex 550 mechanics, stretched to 700 size, and with a direct drive tail rotor motor.  The DD Tail gets rid of a lot of unreliable, noisy, vibrating geartrain.  The heli is very smooth and you can hear the blades instead of gears screaming.  In person, it's actually eerily quiet, if there's a wind out, you can barely hear it from a few hundred feet away.

This video is pretty tame.  But I wanted to show how stable the and precise Arducopter can be.  Normally I shoot test video in worst-case conditions, but most marketing videos are done to show perfect performance, so here you go.

This is only my 4th flight on this new heli, and I'm still getting it dialed in.  Alt Hold has absolutely no problem at all with the Asymmetric rotor blades.

This video is also the first appearance of the DD Motor control feature which should be coming out with 3.1.  The motor control for the tail motor comes out of Ch7.  The setpoint can be changed in MP, independently of the main motor setpoint. And it can be started before the main motor, or held on after the main motor is off (auto-gyro flight).  One very nice feature of this system is that you can have different flight modes on the main rotor, low speed and high speed, but the tail motor retains a set speed, even with a very low main rotor speed, so you retain tail authority.

I've been working on testing and making a few changes to AC3.0 lately, and did a whole bunch of test flights today which went very well. AC3.0 is simply amazing, and there's more good things to come, including a real acro mode that myself, Leonard and few other people have been working on.  Hopefully it should be released in 3.1, along with the changes I'm making to the TradHeli code.  Most of what I've done to 3.0 are relatively minor, the official 3.0 does work fine on TradHelis, but my changes make it more stable and precise, and perfect the take-off and landing.

I shot a video to show of the performance of the system.  I was hoping for a very windy day, but the weather hasn't been coorperating lately.  Not only is the wind not very high, but the space weather is bad and I experienced a lot of GPS drifting today.

Anyway, here you go.  It's a bit long, but I wanted to be thorough.

I took my new Pulsar H-8 Octocopter for a test flight tonight.  I'm getting ready for more flights with the Nex5 camera, so I wanted to give it a bit of a shakedown run. For this flight it has a Contour camera mounted just for fun.  Previous to this flight, some of the bearings sounded and felt a little iffy...  and now we know why!

One of the motors failed and came apart in flight.  It appears that when it came off, it actually hit another propeller, stopping it.  The H-8 now had two adjacent props stopped which isn't good.  It does a flip, but then miraculously recovers after the second motor re-starts.  I've never seen a better example of Arducopter stability and fault tolerance.  In the past, I've disabled motors by removing the props to test the performance, but it's just not the same as the real thing.

Mounties in Saskatchewan are crediting a high-tech drone for the rescue of a man who had walked away from his vehicle after a rollover crash and could not be found.

Sgt. Doug Green, who deployed the drone in the search, told CBC News the machine was built and designed by a Saskatoon company, Draganfly Innovations.

"It's a small little four-armed helicopter that has the capability of a camera or a FLIR [Forward Looking Infrared] or a low-light camera attachment that has a video link right back to the hand-held controller that I fly it with," Green explained. "I see exactly what the camera is looking at and I can control the camera up and down."

RCMP are trying out Saskatoon-made drones. A Dragan Flyer X4-ES was used to find an injured man who wandered away from a roll over crash. (Draganfly.com)

Green said the drone used a FLIR camera which detects heat from an object during Thursday morning's rescue.

He said that in most highway crashes, victims are found near to their vehicles or within about 200 metres.

In Thursday's case, Green said the man suffered a head injury and was disoriented.

"He just, instead of phoning right away, he wandered off and got lost in the dark," Green said, adding it was cold, the field had water in it and the wind was picking up. "He was wet and cold."

Green said the RCMP have been using the Dragan Flyer X4-ES for just over a year in a series of trials to determine how they might assist different elements of police work. Green was equipped with one for use in traffic analysis.

"We're still just trying out different platforms," he said, adding that five officers have obtained the necessary training and licences from aviation authorities to fly the devices.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/story/2013/05/09/sk-rcmp-drone-infrared-night-rescue-130509.html

More Info on the RCMP operations:

http://www.draganfly.com/our-customers/customer_spotlight/RCMP_spotlight_v5.pdf

I have been working on improving the TradHeli slowly but surely over the past few months.  One major aspect I've been working on is the ability to use full Pitch and Roll I-term.  Currently in 2.9.1 these are "Leaky" which limits their build-up to avoid tip-overs on the ground.  I have created a robust Take-off detection scheme that allows us to switch over to full I-term (as the multirotors use) for much better dynamic flight.  However, the system must switch back over to "Leaky" I-term once it touches the ground again to avoid tipping over.

I have managed to accomplish this, based largely on the work of Leonard and Randy who provided such a great Alt_Hold controller that if can also quite accurately detect a touch-down.

Another minor part of this is that while the heli is on the ground, I limit the negative collective pitch to less than full negative, so that we do not push the heli hard into the ground.

Here is the video from today using my 450 testbed.  I'm not working on this with my large 600.  Back to the field!

This code exists only in my branch which is based on 2.9.1.  I have not pushed these latest changes yet but will later tonight.

I just ran across this this morning on  Engadget, Wired online. It immediately struck me as almost a "holy grail" of tablets to use for a ground control station.  It has plenty of buttons, and 2 joysticks.  We already have the excellent Andropilot app.  Now we have built in controls...  Maybe we should pool some money to send one of these to Kevin Hester.  

The only problem is the specs are a little lightweight:

- 7" 1024x600 display, no mention of brightness

- Android 4.1 Jellybean

- Arm Coretex A9 dual-core 1.6 GHz

- 8GB Flash, 1GB Ram, with a microSD card slot

The really good news is it's only $170. It's definitely worth experimenting with.

I'd kick in $20 to send one to Kevin Hester if he's interested in developing it for AndroPilot use.  Anybody else?

Wired Review

Archos GamePad Page

I stumbled upon this... um... interesting video on Youtube.  Amazingly over 500,000 people have already watched it.  I think for the most part it's just some guys having fun with guns.  But it's another interesting insight into the growing fearmongering about domestic drones.

The statement that "The first person to shoot down a drone will be folk hero" is probably quite true I think.

Well, I finally did it.  First in history?  Powered sideways flips (I give it a shot of negative pitch when it's upside down).

As most of you may or may not know, I've been a big proponent of using PPM Sum (aka CPPM) with the Ardupilot since I first figured out how to make it work.  The simplicity of just running a single wire from the Rx to the APM is very attractive.  It eliminates 7 possible failure modes (losing the wire connecting channels 2-8) which could result in loss of control.  There's only 1 wire to get right, but also one wire to get wrong.  Fortunately, the APM can handle complete loss of signal well, and if you set your failsafe to handle complete signal loss, all is good.

I was using this on my HK450GT FBL helicopter, along with a FrSky D8R-SP Rx. Again, as anybody who knows me is aware, I'm a big fan of FrSky radio equipment.  It is affordable, and high performance offering true diversity on the Rx, easy to use CPPM (just requires a jumper on two pins), the Rx is very tolerant of low voltage (it'll keep going LONG after the APM would have shut down, down below 3V).  And rebooting and reacquiring the Tx signal takes less than 1 second.

All of these features are superior to the big name brands, Futaba, Spektrum, etc.

And the telemetry features offered by FrSky is just the icing on the cake.  RSSI (signal strength), Rx voltage, external voltage (flight battery), and even the option for a telemetry hub with all kinds of goodies This is somewhat negated by using an APM, but still, you can put one of these on your Tx and have all the info right at your fingertips.

Anyway, back to my little 450 heli with a HUGE Rx mounted on it, the D8R-SP.

I discovered that FrSky offer a new Rx, the D4Fr which is a small, yet full-range Rx.  And while it only has 4 channels out, it can be configured to do 8-channel CPPM with the simple addition of a jumper! Brilliant, and there's no reason why any modern compact receiver shouldn't be able to do this.  This Rx does not have as many telemetry features as it's big brother.  It can only report RSSI and Rx Voltage, it does not have connectors for the telemetry hub or external voltage.  But that's fine, as the APM can be used to report voltage anyway.  So I ordered one and it arrived Friday.

I started working on setting it up, when the wheels started turning in my brain.  The "case" is just a flimsy plastic thing, almost useless anyway.  And I'm only going to have a single cable going from the Rx to the APM, and it's so small.  And the APM2 has those stand-off pins onto which the daughterboard is soldered.  And those pins are kinda long...  And I've got this piece of empty prototype board sitting around...

Pretty soon I had de-cased the Rx and stripped all the input pins off the APM2.

I soldered the proto-board to the daughter board standoffs, and then glued the Rx board onto the proto-board.  I soldered jumpers on both the Rx and APM2 in order to set both into CPPM mode.  And then I soldered a jumper wire for the CPPM signal, power and ground.  Done.

The complete unit is compact.  There's no wires to get in the way of whatever vibration-damping mount you are using.  There are no wires to come disconnected.  I suspect this setup is at least an order of magnitude more reliable than a standard 8-channel APM2 setup.

Even better, it's compact, and easy to move between vehicles.

http://www.bigwhite.com/passholders/drone-session-contest/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=SP+-+March+18&utm_content=SP+-+March+18+CID_45b387d3f9aeb7aeff87bcbc0959cc6b&utm_source=StickyMail&utm_term=Drone%20Video%20Infomation%20%20Enter%20to%20Win

This just popped up on a Canadian Commercial Operator Facebook group and we're discussing the implications and legal possibilities.  Apparently the operator claims that this has been cleared with Transport Canada, but nobody is sure yet what the details of tha

http://www.bigwhite.com/passholders/drone-session-contest/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=SP+-+March+18&utm_content=SP+-+March+18+CID_45b387d3f9aeb7aeff87bcbc0959cc6b&utm_source=StickyMail&utm_term=Drone%20Video%20Infomation%20%20Enter%20to%20Win

This just popped up on a Canadian Commercial Operator Facebook group and we're discussing the implications and legal possibilities.  Apparently the operator claims that this has been cleared with Transport Canada, but nobody is sure yet what the details of that are.

http://www.bigwhite.com/passholders/drone-session-contest/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=SP+-+March+18&utm_content=SP+-+March+18+CID_45b387d3f9aeb7aeff87bcbc0959cc6b&utm_source=StickyMail&utm_term=Drone%20Video%20Infomation%20%20Enter%20to%20Win

This just popped up on a Canadian Commercial Operator Facebook group and we're discussing the implications and legal possibilities.  Apparently the operator claims that this has been cleared with Transport Canada, but nobody is sure yet what the details of that are.

This does not appear to fit in with existing commercial regulations.  It seems unlikely that a commercial operator would be able to get a permit to fly in a crowded area like a ski hill.  I have taken a guess as to what is going on here:

The operator is not operating the drone.  They are renting drones to recreational users.  Not much different than selling drones to recreational users.  The user is the pilot in command, not a commercial operator.  The user captures images of himself.  Then the operator edits the footage.  It would bypass all of the commercial regulations.  Some disagree that this would be legally possible, but I don't see why it would not.

Currently, a person can rent a Uhaul truck, without being required to possess a commercial truck license.  And I think it would be over-reaching if the government tried to stop a person from paying somebody to edit footage for them, no matter how it was captured.

The kediydrones.com