Time to fly!
After some test flights with my own stabiliztion code in the Ardupilot, everything is now ready to du the first test flight with waypoint navigation.
As you can see in tthe photo its a mess with cables and boards, but everything is tested.
The setup is a little bit different from the ArduPilot. I have included a Robostix (AtMega128) board to do all navigational tasks and i'm using the ardu pilot for stabilization. The main advantage besides more memory is that the Mega128 has two serial ports. This means that i have two way communications to my ground station as well as two way GPS communicaion. Communication between the nav-unit and the stabilization-unit is also over a serial line (for the time beeing). I have hooked up the two modules in series. All commands from the ground is received in the nav unit. All commands with an id over 100 is passed on to the stab unit and passed on to the ground station. This way i can update PID settings in the stab unit as well as waypoints in the nav unit. I can also receive information from both units. Not the most efficient solution, but it works and it saved me a lot of time. The more time consuming alternative would have been to use I2C or SPI communitcation between nav and stab modules.
Well, time to sleep now. All batteries are charging and waypoints are loaded. Weather should be OK tomorrow afternoon in Stockholm just keep your fingers crossed!
/Magnus
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