Tim Trueman's Posts (49)

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This week we were joined by Doug Weibel and Jason Short, the team leaders of the ArduPilot and ArduPilot Mega code project. They're the ones working hard on getting the APM Beta ready for release at the end of the month (alpha is already out, of course), and talked about the design and feature decisions they made with APM, as well as the roadmap for 1.0 (in September) and beyond.



(sorry for the late post)
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Richard Hanson, who works on the AMA's Regulatory and Governmental Affairs operations. The regulatory process to introduce UAVs in the National Airspace (NAS) is a long, tortured and potentially disastrous ordeal for us. If it goes well, we'll be given guidelines or laws under which to operate, which create a category for small amateur UAVs that allows us to operate safely and still do interesting work. If it doesn't go well, we could be banned entirely.

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In the near future you should be able to find a paper on the details of how this was done on Daniel's website: http://fling.seas.upenn.edu/~dmel/wiki/index.php?n=Main.Quadrotor

Motion capture system used/mentioned: http://vicon.com/

Help Daniel break into the 1M YouTube views club—sent this to all your friends!
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Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows

While this isn't strictly relevant (mods feel free to remove this post), I was blow away by this TED talk on the intelligence of crows. I hope I never have a crow take interest in any drone I'm operating.


Perhaps there would be a way to have drones and crows work together?
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Free video streaming by Ustream

Tonight we'll do podcast #26, which everyone here is welcome to participate in by listening to the chat live above and commenting and asking questions via the DIY Drones chat function. We'll be starting at 8:00 PM PST not our usual 9:00PM PST time (since our guest is a few timezones ahead of us) and will probably go about 40 minutes.

This week we'll by joined by Daniel Mellinger, who you may or may not know but there's a high probability if you're on DIY Drones you've seen some of his work making quadrotors do very aggressive maneuvers.

As always you can subscribe to the podcast here. Tonight's livecast will be recorded and available as a podcast by Tues of the next week.
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Photo credit: Wired January 2006 article on Stanley, Stanford's entry into the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/stanley.html


This is a great talk by Sebastian at Google on winning the DARPA Grand Challenge:



The autonomous stunt helicopters we mention are a project run by Andrew Ng, a colleague of Sebastian's at Stanford. Check out the project's website if you missed earlier posts linking to it: http://heli.stanford.edu/

Also, anyone who's website is "robots.stanford.edu" you know is just awesome.

Apologies on the audio—we both took recordings but it gets a bit muffled when we walk down hallways single file.
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[Apologies for the rough editing and loud background noise—there were tens of thousands of people there and it was nearly impossible to find some quiet to record.]

iTunes links
AAC: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=330632997
MP3: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=330633212

RSS feed
AAC: http://feeds.feedburner.com/diydrones
MP3: http://feeds.feedburner.com/diydronesmp3


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Photo: Chris talking to Pete Hollands at SparkFun

I'm sorry for the delay, this episode was recorded by Chris' phone and my laptop and the background noise required a lot more edits than usual. Jack Crossfire will be pleased to note that I found the source of the reverb and confined it to a theoretical vacuum. Of course the background noise probably didn't help (it's better at the end) but the quality should be up from here on out!

iTunes links
AAC: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=330632997
MP3: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=330633212

RSS feed
AAC: http://feeds.feedburner.com/diydrones
MP3: http://feeds.feedburner.com/diydronesmp3

Guests include (although a couple of them may not have spoken):
  • Chris Anderson
  • Bill Premerlani
  • Ben Levitt
  • Adam Barrow
  • Tim Trueman
  • Pete Hollands
  • Earl Campbell
  • Jordi Muñoz
  • Ryan Beall
And thanks to Doug Weibel for hosting the podcast in his home!
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Prerecorded podcast = no live podcast tonight

Testing out the AR.Drone (see the two orange LEDs floating in the air) in Doug Weibel's backyard—this is the podcast crew.

We recorded a roundtable podcast at Doug Weibel's (one of the main contributors to ArduPilot 2.6) house the night before the SparkFun Electronics Autonomous Vehicle Competition with roughly a dozen people involved. There were a few people who had been previous guests (Bill Premerlani, Jordi Muñoz and Ryan Beall for instance). It's a little bit different than our regular shows but I'm sure it'll be interesting!
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iTunes links
AAC: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=330632997
MP3: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=330633212

RSS feed
AAC: http://feeds.feedburner.com/diydrones
MP3: http://feeds.feedburner.com/diydronesmp3

Check out Nima's two profiles, http://diydrones.com/profile/NimaKayvan and http://diydrones.com/profile/NimaK, as well as the Project Andromeda website: http://www.projectandromeda.com.au/


Also I forgot to mention last month was our first month to surpass 100GB of downloads. Crazy!

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iTunes links
AAC: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=330632997
MP3: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=330633212

RSS feed
AAC: http://feeds.feedburner.com/diydrones
MP3: http://feeds.feedburner.com/diydronesmp3

Check out Krzysztof's profile, http://diydrones.com/profile/KrzysztofBosak and his latest post: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/what-can-be-flown-using-rudder

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iTunes links
AAC: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=330632997
MP3: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=330633212

RSS feed
AAC: http://feeds.feedburner.com/diydrones
MP3: http://feeds.feedburner.com/diydronesmp3

Nathan's addiction to microcontrollers brings peace and joy to thousands of people with the products, classes and tutorials in the seven years since he started SparkFun Electronics.


CNN Money piece on Nathan: http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/smallbusiness/0902/gallery.make_believers.smb/6.html

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