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3D Robotics

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 7:39pm
    @Jack: Nathan is a nice guy, but that has nothing to do with his decision to make this. The initial costs are low (we did the design and he tweaked it for his production facility) and he'll make up his costs with the first hundred he sells. And he will indeed take a pitch from anyone. Here's his tutorial on submitting one.
  • 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.
  • tychoc January 6, 2009 at 6:08pm
    @Chris. I understand your position on creating an open source community around a LV based code. I will probably us LabVIEW to make my own base station anyway, building on the antenna tracker applicaiton I showed. Maybe we could have two base stations. Once based on C# and I would be happy to share my application written in LabVIEW. The Zigbee telemetry addon sound great! Will it just send down the GPS NMEA data or additional parameters from the ArduPilot?

    -tychoc
  • 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.
  • Venom57 January 6, 2009 at 3:17pm
    I can't believe I just got home from work and they are all sold out..... When is the next fab run?
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