Centrifugal compensation with only gyros and accelerometers

I used to think that either a GPS or a airspeed sensor was needed to perform centrifugal compensation for fixed wing applications. I noticed that several stabilization devices have become available on the commercial market, so I went back and revisit

An improved method for accounting for acceleration in gyro roll-pitch drift computations

Team,

I have worked out a new way to account for acceleration in the computations to detect roll and pitch gyro drift in IMU computations.

The method that is commonly used right now is based on computing centrifugal effects in the body frame of referen

AMA rule 9

Team,

Automatic nulling of magnetometer offsets

[There is now a better method for removing offsets in flight. See this discussion. - WJP]

The picture shows a UAV DevBoard connected to Jordi's magnetometer breakout board.

First, since my discussions tend to get long winded, if you want to "cut to t

Wind estimation without an airspeed sensor

Using UAV DevBoard serial port Tx interrupts

UAV DevBoard Pilots:This topic concerns an efficient way to transfer data through the transmitter of a USART using transmit interrupts.There are two general approaches to sending out a message through a USART. The simplest way to do it, but not the m

Warning: Do not press on the headers of the UAV DevBoard

UAV DevBoard pilots:Be careful not to press on the pin headers of the UAV DevBoard, especially the gyros.It turns out that is exactly what I have been doing several times a week, for many weeks. I do a lot of programming and I found it convenient to

robust estimator of the direction cosine matrix

If you downloaded MatrixNav from this page before 4/29/2009, you should be aware that there is a newer version of the firmware, MatrixNavRv2, that reduces the GPS latency, and will perform much better than the first version.I have been working with P

Maximum safe servo PWM pulse rate

This is old news for most of you, but not everyone received the memo.There is a maximum safe pulse repetition rate of approximately 40 pulses per second for the most common PWM servos. The uppper limit arises because of the pulse stretcher circuitry

GPS cable

Sooner or later, someone is going to ask about a longer cable to connect their GPS to the UAV DevBoard.I am hoping that, sooner or later, someone will offer a longer cable with the correct connectors, maybe they do already, and I just don't about it.