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Beginner with $650

Posted by Giles Barton-Owen on November 29, 2009 at 3:09am
My aim is to make a simple Ardupilot setup on a EasyStar for strictly £400 or $650 (but shipping is expensive globally as I'm in the UK). I have the Fidi programmer and reasonable Arduino experience so thats not a problem but I want to know, for instance whether the 4Hz GPS is worth the extra $100 etc. (I already have the 32 Channel LS20031 GPS 5Hz Receiver carried by sparkfun) and a Spectrum DX5e w/ receiver.Any mods to the EasyStar worth doing to start with? (I can get it for £80 inc. delivery)I know that its probably covered else where but not all in one place.Any comments would be much obliged.
Tags: ardupilot, beginer, budget
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  • Giles Barton-Owen December 2, 2009 at 11:23am
    Which glue should I use for construction?
  • Giles Barton-Owen November 29, 2009 at 2:18pm
    So I mod up the EasyStar, and I need the Adupilot main board, the shield, the XYZ thermopiles and I can use my data radios. And I need some female cables to connect everything up. Have I forgotten anything?
  • Chris Roberts November 29, 2009 at 2:17pm
    Hi Giles, it will be be interested to see how you get on. I too am building a system for the same price as you and live in the UK. I have ordered everything except the XBee and GPS chip wasn't sure what to go for (uBlox or the EM406!) I have gone for the AXN cloud as to fly (its looks identical to the easystar but has ailerons - cost about £60 delivered from china - they have them on brc hobbies) - it should be here any day!
    Haven't got the telemetry yet as am not completely sure on frequency restrictions in the uk as i want to stream the video aswell!
    There is a UK store that sells most stuff you need - (www.coolcomponents.co.uk). I got the Ardupilot from there but it worked out cheaper to get most of it from the diydrones store - even with postage!
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson November 29, 2009 at 12:43pm
    It just means you won't be able to select multiple modes. So you'd have, for example, manual and WP, rather than manual, RTL, and WP.
  • Giles Barton-Owen November 29, 2009 at 12:31pm
    What should I do about the fact that the DX5e has only a single on/off toggle switch?
  • Giles Barton-Owen November 29, 2009 at 10:47am
    And $100 for shipping. Sigh, damn the UK
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson November 29, 2009 at 10:46am
    Given that you've already got the RC gear, your budget seems fine. All of the ArduPilot equipment, including wireless telemetry and a ground station, is less than $400. The EasyStar with the brushless upgrade is about another $100. Beyond that, your only big expenses would be any camera or video equipment you want to add.
  • Giles Barton-Owen November 29, 2009 at 10:40am
    How much have people spent on their setup?
  • Paul Mather November 29, 2009 at 7:41am
    The two messages you need to make sure are enabled on your GPS are GPRMC and GPGGA. Typically you can send a $PMTK314 command to enable and disable NMEA strings.

    PMTK commands can be found here:

    http://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/GPS/Modules/PMTK_Protocol

    You'll probably want to use:
    $PMTK314,0,1,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0*28
    $PMTK313,1*2E
    $PMTK301,2*2E
    $PMTK220,200*2C
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson November 29, 2009 at 7:03am
    Giles, you can use your LS20031 (ArduPilot has a NMEA parser, so you can use an NMEA GPS), but we won't be able to support it since we haven't used one ourself. The only two officially supported GPSs are the uBlox and the EM406.

    As for the EasyStar, I would really recommend a brushless/Lipo upgrade. It's pretty underpowered in the stock configuration.
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