About

Gender

Male


Location

Victoria, BC


About Me:

Electrical Engineer w/ emphasis in control systems.


Please tell us a bit about your UAV interest

Started with a COTS frame with the goal to create my own controller using a dedicated AHRS w/ EKF (quaternion/Euler angle estimator) that would provide controller redundancy with an FY-90Q backup and a watchdog signal. Never had success with FY-90Q and further research into quads landed me to obtain an OpenPilot CopterControl board, which yielded my first quad flight but was short lived when one of my dogs came 'round with a snoot full of static :( Been on waiting list for ArduPilotMega V2 board and installed it recently and won't look back. It's everything I tried making my controller all wrapped up in a much smaller package with even more features--not to mention a well design ground control station. I've stopped reinventing the wheel, as APM2 is exactly what I need and want and is my go-to controller.


Hometown:

Victoria, BC


Activity Feed

Scott Thompson commented on Makoto EZURE's photo
"Is that a flying muffin tin?  Terrific setup; wonderful display.  Thanks for sharing."
Sep 16, 2012
Scott Thompson commented on Chris Anderson's blog post Invensense releases licence to allow use of the MPU-6000 DMP processor
"I'm a fan of using the DMP fusion algorithm and started in quads with the intent of using a CH Robotics' CHR-UM6 with a PIC32.  APM 2 came out with even more functionality than what I could install on my real estate and did it in a smaller package,…"
Jul 28, 2012
Scott Thompson commented on Scott Thompson's blog post First Endeavors: New to RC to Building First Quad to First Flights of Unit.84
"Installed APM2 v2.5.5 and have never experienced a greater flight!  Wanted to share this setup:

Frame: Hoverthings VC-550
Motors: AXI 2217/20
ESC: Maytech 30
Battery: ThunderPower G6 4S 3300 mAh
Props: Carbon filled; 9" x 4.7
Radio: Spektrum DX8 w/…"
May 15, 2012
Scott Thompson commented on Jean-Louis Naudin's blog post APMRover 2, a fun UGV project for full autonomous recon missions...
"@Martin: I don't see why one couldn't get the code to pause at waypoints; maybe even future versions can use RFID sensors.  Not sure how or if the GCS would need to get a plugin to handle this/these feature(s)...  Certainly opens up the creative…"
May 5, 2012
Scott Thompson commented on Jean-Louis Naudin's blog post APMRover 2, a fun UGV project for full autonomous recon missions...
"My original robot is just not agile enough to perform outside of the halls of university ;)  Thanks to many who posted on here--you've convinced me that I want to play with this feature of a UGV but will instead be switching to a 1/8 scale rock…"
May 5, 2012
Scott Thompson commented on Jean-Louis Naudin's blog post APMRover 2, a fun UGV project for full autonomous recon missions...
"I take back my comment about having to stick with the PIC32 here.  I think the Arduino could handle the PID control for each wheel and handle the other tasks such as radio input and servo output.  May have to switch it to integer math, though.  Will…"
Apr 28, 2012
Scott Thompson commented on Jean-Louis Naudin's blog post APMRover 2, a fun UGV project for full autonomous recon missions...
"Okay, it looked like an R/C car type of chassis.  I will have to stick to the PIC32 instead of going with the Arduino (although the ATMega is used as the slave MCU for driving the scrolling-text display), as there are significant resources being…"
Apr 28, 2012
Scott Thompson commented on Jean-Louis Naudin's blog post APMRover 2, a fun UGV project for full autonomous recon missions...
"This is great; I've been working on rover code and implementing a version of MAVlink and qGroundControl but it looks like some of the work has been done already.  My code runs on a PIC32MX, though, and uses FreeRTOS to coordinate many of the tasks.…"
Apr 28, 2012
Scott Thompson commented on Scott Thompson's blog post Implementing ESC Fail Safe
"First, a clarification of my initial motivations:

(1) my first quadcopter design was to use redundant flight controllers.  A heartbeat signal would switch between the two controllers.  This was because I was designing my own controller and was…"
Apr 24, 2012
Scott Thompson posted a blog post
I had a request to provide information on how I implemented an ESC fail safe on my quadcopter and posted a small image of the process under the ArduCopter 2.5 firmware thread.  Since I suspect there may be a more general interest in this, I'm…
Apr 23, 2012
Scott Thompson commented on Paul W. Quimby's blog post Building a model of an RC helicopter
"I have to rework my post in that I misinterpreted the "z-axis" as for some reason being a rotation (yaw) around the z-axis and forgot that the original goal was for altitude stabilization.  My headspace was in modeling the quadcopter's dynamics, so…"
Mar 27, 2012
Scott Thompson commented on Paul W. Quimby's blog post Building a model of an RC helicopter
"+1 to the discrete time solution.  Are there no moments or inertial terms because you're taking the yaw right at the rotor head?  I love your drive.  Good luck with your project."
Mar 25, 2012
Scott Thompson commented on Scott Thompson's blog post First Endeavors: New to RC to Building First Quad to First Flights of Unit.84
"^^^ that may be the OpenPilot board but the APM2 board went through a similar process."
Mar 11, 2012
Scott Thompson commented on Scott Thompson's blog post First Endeavors: New to RC to Building First Quad to First Flights of Unit.84
"Here's a *very* boring video of me setting up the quad on a quick-and-dirty test jig to dial in the rate and stabilize PID parameters."
Mar 11, 2012
Scott Thompson commented on Scott Thompson's blog post First Endeavors: New to RC to Building First Quad to First Flights of Unit.84
"Radio is Bluetooth, 2.4 GHz.  Good for very short range telemetry/parameter setup.  Luckily, it works with Spektrum receivers (also 2.4 GHz).  Will replace it with Xbee 900 Pro tomorrow when it shows up in the mail.
Radio receiver is Spektrum…"
Mar 11, 2012
Scott Thompson commented on Tim O'Brien's photo
"Love the evolution of robots, and the blue box.  This looks palm-size--how small is it?"
Mar 11, 2012
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