Having a background in electronics I wanted to build my own flightcontroller. At the same time I decided to build a new quadcopter. Having bought a 3d printer from Ultimaker, I printed a quadcopter frame inspired on the original Crossfire design from MickeyB (thingiverse).
printed part
Inspired by the ArduCopter, KK2.0 and AeroQuad firmware I wrote my own code using the PSOC3 (Programmable System on Chip) platform form Cypress. The custom flightcontroller circuit board was fabricated using Elektor printservice.
assembled flightcontroller
The 9DOF sensor stick of Sparkfun is mounted on top of circuit.
topview mounted flightcontroller
A cheap Nokia 5110 LCD is used as a simple flightcontroller UI. A RS232 interface links the flightcontroller to the PC in order to load the calculated/calibrated offsets and PID parameters using a simple python script.
python quadcopter pc ui
3d graph of a calibrated magnetometer sensor
Finally I tweeked a little bit the FrSky Taranis transmitter in order to display the pitch, roll and heading calculated by the flightcontroller on the telemetry page.
telemetry screen Taranis
The pitch is dispalyed as T1 (temperature1), the roll as T2 (temperature2) and the heading as Curr (current).
At present first testflights are carried out.
Comments
If you ever want to join the dev group and help us push arducopter & arduplane forward we're on drones-discuss@googlegroups.com. No pressure though. Everybody's got their own reasons for working on things.
Thx for the compliments. It flies ok, but my pilot skills are very limited. Still need a lot of practicing.
Well, that really is very impressive.
I guess it flies ok?
Chapeau! A lot of work in a lot of areas at the same time.