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AttoPilot review, Part 1: The PCB board

Posted by Chris Anderson on April 2, 2009 at 11:39pm

I just got an AttoPilot in and plan to review it in several parts. Today's part: the PCB board. As you might expect from a former Intel engineer, Dean Goedde has done a great job of PCB design. Neat trace layouts, good noise protection and robust components. The board is based on a 5Mhx Parallax Propeller chip, with 8 cores. It has a differential pressure sensor for speed and a single pressure sensor for altitude. It also has 512k of on-board memory in addition to that in the Propeller chip. Click on the photo and you'll be taken to Flickr, where you can mouse over the components to find out what they are AttoPilot board top And here's the bottom of the board. Click on this one, too, to find out what the components are: AttoPilot board bottom
Tags: attopilot
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  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson April 4, 2009 at 9:52pm
    For those of you who may be confused by this comment chain, I've got one of the first AttoPilots that went out and this should not be considered the final version. There is no paper documentation with the product at all at this stage (obviously most commercial products come with the warranty in the box) and the documentation on the supplied SD card is still unfinished. But the hardware is first class and you can expect the rest to follow suit shortly.
  • Dean April 4, 2009 at 9:41pm
    Of course warranty is part of the product. But, would you pay for replacement of a product you sell to someone if they had taken it apart? This is why I worded the warranty/liability form the way I did. At $800, I'm making small $ after you add up all my costs, components, assembly and paranoid quadruple checking of everything.

    The warranty/liability signing is not "pre-sale", it is part of the sale process. Autopilot = weapons technology... thus I get people to sign a form before I sell.
  • Michael April 4, 2009 at 9:31pm
    Dean,

    It is a great product and I am wondering if you anticipated the likely hood of people reverse engineering it? Perhaps a Chinese company may get its hands on one and pump them out for a quarter the price? Is there anything you can do to stop this? I know there are patents and trademarks for protection, however, these are pretty useless when your dealing with China.

    Michael
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson April 4, 2009 at 9:13pm
    Ah, my apologies. I thought the warranty would be part of the product. I'd forgotten about the pre-sale signing process.

    Don't worry, the next posts in the review are coming right up. And as for the stripdown, we do that for everything. It's pretty much standard in the gadget review industry (see our GadgetLab for examples). This is par for the course--we do it to Apple, too!
  • Dean April 4, 2009 at 9:06pm
    It is item 6 in the Warranty/Liability form you signed and faxed to me... I am holding it in my hand.

    I'd just rather have a public reverse-engineer or dissection be on a PicoPilot or something I'm not depending on to help make my mortgage payments. Sorry for the downer here... I just didn't expect this type of evaluation. I was hoping you would install it and go right to the evaluation of how easy you feel it is to setup, tune, and use.
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson April 4, 2009 at 8:16pm
    "..a person voided their warranty by taking the Atto out of the case."

    Actually, nothing in the documentation says that the warranty is voided if Attopilot is taken out of the case. In fact nothing in the documentation says anything about a warranty at all. Maybe there isn't one? ;-)

    [Note: I'm just kidding. The documentation isn't finished and I'm sure this is something that will get in the final versions.]
  • Developer
    Jordi Muñoz April 4, 2009 at 7:02pm
    Ohh! Thanks for that!
  • Noth666 April 4, 2009 at 6:38am
    @tom: its VTi's MCP1000 MEMS pressure sensor - extremely accurate but check the specs yourself depends on how u use it also.
    The other is MPXV7002DP for airspeed - I have a bunch of them for prototyping, you can get them in different sensitivities and operating voltages but he is using 5V 2Kpa
  • Tom in NOVA April 4, 2009 at 6:14am
    Thank you for the post, looking forward the other parts.

    What is the make of the altimeter sensor? Do you know what resolution is it capable (in meters/centimeters)?
  • TESTPILOT April 3, 2009 at 9:27pm
    AttoPilot says it comes with ground control softwear could you post pics of it working ? if you have it setup for it. also RangeVideo OSD would it work with attopilot ? anyone know?
    im trying to cram all this gear in the 4-Channel Electric UAV RQ-1 Predator 63" with LWC25-3 - 2.4GHz -25 Mile Range 1Watt Airborne Video Downlink also anyone know how to get 25 miles out a JR radio ?
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