I've been following DIY Drones for awhile and in the past have purchased several components that made up the pre-oilpan era of electronics. I was looking forward to the proposed ArudPilot-lite board that appears to have since been canceled. So I made my own! And in the process, learned great deal about designing, fabricated and programming Arduino.
At this point it has not seen any flight time. But all of the electronics are on a single board and have been tested. What you are seeing is Rev3 which has a GPS, 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis gyro, 3-axis magentometer and a pressure/temperature sensor on board. 5 servo inputs and 4 outputs. Servos can be powered by the battery or from the ESC. Battery voltage level is monitored using a voltage divider, and there are 7 IO pins available for expansion.
If you'd like to follow my progress, I'll be updating this page as I go along: http://www.happicow.com/arduvolans.php
Comments
Chris, Nice looking board. I agree with Jani i would take the gps externally make the board a bit smaller and add usb for easy programing.
How many PCB layers? Nice to see "forks" of the hardware too. :)
Chris, nice work!
I'm guessing, based on the specs (you're using an Atmega644p chip, which has 25% as much memory as APM) that you'll be running some derivative of the legacy ArduPilot/ArduIMU code? It's certainly possible to put both the ArduPilot and ArduIMU code bases on the same chip, but you don't have the hardware failsafe processor/multiplexor so you'll have to do PPM encoding on that chip, too. Probably doable, but it will be a bit of a coding challenge.
I suppose you could mount it on stilts, and put the IDC headers on the reverse side of the board if it is a problem. Looks pretty good - might be useful for ultra light systems as it would save a few grams compared to having the APM and the oilpan.
Chris, great looking board but you might have problems with it. I mean with GPS. As you are using patch antenna, you are blocking most of it's reception as it is surrounded by pin headers and later with cables.
To have best reception with that GPS, it should see whole horizon. Ok it will work but getting proper lock from satellites and to get strong signal can be a problem.
Also when you put all cables there, you might accidentally create a Faraday cage around it well we all know that then your reception is dead.
On next board try to have it somewhere else and keep mind that it should see whole sky to have good reception. Maybe a daughter board would be a good idea for it.
Quick radiation pattern for patch antennas:
If you live close to Equator reception is not so big problem but more north/southern you live more important it is to have a unblocked visibility on 0-45 degree areas.
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