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ArduPilot now available to buy!

Posted by Chris Anderson on January 6, 2009 at 9:00am

Great news! ArduPilot is now available to buy at Sparkfun. The price is $24.95 (or buy 100 at $19.96 each ;-)). Note: there is a limited number available now, but Sparkfun can make more pretty quickly so get your order in now and they'll be filled from backorder in the order they were received.

[Update on availability from Sparkfun: ~15 coming out of production today/morrow. 63 more PCBs ready. Waiting on xtals (probably about a week).]

You'll also need an EM406 GPS module, and for all but the most stable planes, an FMA Co-Pilot, so unless you already have those items, the total cost of the autopilot will be around $155.

Huge thanks to Nathan Siedle at Sparkfun for helping us get through the production snafus and otherwise taking this project under his wing. Now let's win his autonomous vehicle competition with an ArduPilot-guided plane!

Tags: ardupilot
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Comments

  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson January 6, 2009 at 7:31pm
    @tychoc. The more the merrier! The way we handle telemetry data is to construct a "synthetic" NMEA sentence with the parameters we want (we called it $JORDI ;-)) and then just parse it with our regular NMEA parser.
  • Jack Crossfire January 6, 2009 at 6:43pm
    Nathan must be a pretty nice guy for covering the initial production costs & testing on this. Not many people are going to throw down an initial run of fully fabricated & tested boards for any pitch & he must get zillions of pitches like Walmart.
  • 3D Robotics
    Julian January 6, 2009 at 4:20pm
    cool beans!!!! Nice work you guys
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson January 6, 2009 at 3:58pm
    Yes, Xbee Pro. Hopefully w/in the next month.
  • 3D Robotics
    Julian January 6, 2009 at 3:47pm
    Just got one, and I saw in the description something about a downlink system being integrated with Ardupilot and currently being coded. Xbee im guessing? Any ball park estimates on when you think that would become avaliable?
  • ren January 6, 2009 at 3:38pm
    I guess I should say sorry for the joke before people start buying up pillows too ;op
    Looking forward to hear everyones reports and findings in the next few weeks for sure!
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson January 6, 2009 at 3:25pm
    There should be few more tomorrow and another 60 or so by next week.
  • ren January 6, 2009 at 2:30pm
    congrats Chris and Jordi!
    a job well done

    when I went to SparkFun just now they were in stock again so I order all 63
    I hope I don't upset anyone ;oP
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson January 6, 2009 at 2:26pm
    @ian: Many thanks! That post is now updated with those additional examples.

    Looks like the critical mass is forming around Arduino, Propeller and the various ARM7 chips (Paparazzi, etc).

    One rarely sees the words "Linux" and "friendly" together. My hat's off to you ;-)
  • ian January 6, 2009 at 2:05pm
    @Chris: I have no familiarity with Ning. I suppose a Wikipedia page might work.
    I have a rather scattered text file I should go through, but off the top of my head:
    http://www.mikroquad.com/bin/view
    http://ng.uavp.ch/
    http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=944087
    http://seanreynoldscs.com/WashUAV.aspx

    I might wait a month or two to see how others get along with all the various options before taking the plunge. Paparazzi seemed to have the most features an the only platform capable of fixed wing or quadrotor control, an it seems to be linux friendly, so I may give this a go. But vicacopter and several others look impressive too. I'd like to play with video, waypoint navigation, etc.. Thanks for setting up diydrones - I looked few years ago an only found one limited heli project an thought I don't have the enough spare time to get this running, I'll check back later, now the problem is too many choices. :-) I suppose a critical mass will eventually build behind a few of the projects an this will point the way in a few months...or maybe there will just be more projects :)
    Mikroquad.com
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