Posted by Chris Anderson on December 13, 2009 at 10:35pm
Over at RC Groups, there's an interesting thread about Booz, a new Quad Rotor UAV project that uses some of the Paparazzi code as its base.
They write:
"This thread will be a place for all things Booz including the progress of the Booz hardware myself and Gussy are getting made. This will be for sale shortly (around one week) and will sell for US$850 including cables. It has the following features:
Complete hardware using the original Paparazzi BOM, no parts removed to save costs.
LEA-5H GPS.
Professional PCB assembly done by a local assembly house, not soldered at home using a electric frying pan or cheap eBay oven.
All parts fully tested and with code loaded, as we are in Australia we can legally do this and export them worldwide.
Cables included.
We are also working on some 30 amp I2C ESCs, the hardware is complete and they will be MikroKopter compatible down to the software level. These will sell for just $35 each, however, will not be sold with software on them, just a boot loader which I still have to write."
I hear that Invensense are better than the ST, i don't have side to side comparing data, would be nice to do it.
Actually thats a great idea i will develop a board with the ST, Invensense and Analog devices gyros and i will make several test to them together and post the results.
Angus, You are right theres many options. But for my budged $800 dlls is a lot, even if is the best platform i will personally never pay that price for a hobby. I just my opinion and i'm a sarcastic person in a good way. ;-)
Just chiming in with a note of support; it looks like you've done a great job with the board, and the cost side is totally understandable. Making hardware available for the larger community is an important function, and once people understand the economics, I'm sure they'll respond warmly.
I know Thomas, as I said, nothing I can do as who ever designed the hardware saddled me with that expense. However, PPZUAV are also selling them, they want $1060 for a full set without cables so I think we have done fairly well.
I have to stress that this is a project for my own research, I have noticed that people are doing this more and more for profit, this is fine of course but the spirit of the boards I have made is for fun, learning and experimenting. I said on RCG and I'll say here, Booz is a work in progress, it has little documentation, it is really a developers only project for now to be honest.
Despite its slightly high price, Booz sounds to be an interesting product. Furthermore 30Amp ESC with I2C interface for $35 is also attractive (I assume they will soon release source code for it(?))
What is the URL to learn more about Booz and how to order?
Is there an online store?
Where can we find Booz source code?
Considering that "it was designed by a university team", I assume it's control-law (maths) used in its controller is well documented. Where to find the maths/control details of Booz?
Guys, there is nothing much we can do about the price. Booz is expensive and I'm sorry about that, it was designed by a university team to be exemplary in performance, this was priority number one. Cost was naturally given less of a focus, as the team that designed it did so without any commercial interest.
QuadPowered is in a very different league, I think George has done an excellent job with it and if you just want a simple flight controller to hover a Quad around I recommend that above Booz for sure. In time he will add the other features I'm sure.
However, Booz is a UAV solution, not just a simple flight controller, the only thing that comes close to it is a MikroKopter with a ME board, Navi-ctrl, MK-GPS and MK3-Mag. This works out around the same cost as the Booz suit of boards but is less complete.
Gussy and myself did these boards for a bit of fun and to expand our knowledge, Booz is a niche product, has little documentation but also a lot of fun and has a great deal of potential.
I will add one further comment: The commercial side of things is killing a lot of the fun in UAVs, Jordi is having a dig because of the high price of Booz, another Paparazzi vendor is getting upset because we are over $200 cheaper than he is.
Our effort in making this Booz hardware is just a simple effort to provide quality hardware to an Opensource project at a good price. There are several places in the design that we could have cut costs to make these cheaper but elected not to and stick to the original design.
There are always lots of options out there Jordi, look at ArduPilot then AttoPilot, no need to be sarcastic :-)
Anyway, here is an overview of the specs of Booz.
* 3 Tier board setup, Main board, IMU board then GPS Board, all in a cube of about 50x50x50mm (Tiny!)
* Main board has a ARM7 LPC2148 running at 72MHz, 3xUARTS, 1xSPI, 2xI2C
* - Barometer onboard for integrating with GPS altitude for vertical position hold within a foot or less.
* IMU Board has 9DOM, ADXL Gyros, AD Accel's and PNI Magnetometers, all read with a 16Bit ADC
* GPS Board is a typical Ublox LEA-5H board with 18mm ceramic patch antenna and supercapacitor backup
The very cool thing about booz though is it's just a derivation of Paparazzi, so all the current ground station, xml config files etc, are all compatible as is.
@Angus
It does, i have one my in from of me, is called: QuadPowered.. But you know.. you are right, invansense gyros will cost 9 dlls more, so i will have to charge $189 dlls.. =(
Comments
Actually thats a great idea i will develop a board with the ST, Invensense and Analog devices gyros and i will make several test to them together and post the results.
Just chiming in with a note of support; it looks like you've done a great job with the board, and the cost side is totally understandable. Making hardware available for the larger community is an important function, and once people understand the economics, I'm sure they'll respond warmly.
I have to stress that this is a project for my own research, I have noticed that people are doing this more and more for profit, this is fine of course but the spirit of the boards I have made is for fun, learning and experimenting. I said on RCG and I'll say here, Booz is a work in progress, it has little documentation, it is really a developers only project for now to be honest.
What is the URL to learn more about Booz and how to order?
Is there an online store?
Where can we find Booz source code?
Considering that "it was designed by a university team", I assume it's control-law (maths) used in its controller is well documented. Where to find the maths/control details of Booz?
QuadPowered is in a very different league, I think George has done an excellent job with it and if you just want a simple flight controller to hover a Quad around I recommend that above Booz for sure. In time he will add the other features I'm sure.
However, Booz is a UAV solution, not just a simple flight controller, the only thing that comes close to it is a MikroKopter with a ME board, Navi-ctrl, MK-GPS and MK3-Mag. This works out around the same cost as the Booz suit of boards but is less complete.
Gussy and myself did these boards for a bit of fun and to expand our knowledge, Booz is a niche product, has little documentation but also a lot of fun and has a great deal of potential.
I will add one further comment: The commercial side of things is killing a lot of the fun in UAVs, Jordi is having a dig because of the high price of Booz, another Paparazzi vendor is getting upset because we are over $200 cheaper than he is.
Our effort in making this Booz hardware is just a simple effort to provide quality hardware to an Opensource project at a good price. There are several places in the design that we could have cut costs to make these cheaper but elected not to and stick to the original design.
Anyway, here is an overview of the specs of Booz.
* 3 Tier board setup, Main board, IMU board then GPS Board, all in a cube of about 50x50x50mm (Tiny!)
* Main board has a ARM7 LPC2148 running at 72MHz, 3xUARTS, 1xSPI, 2xI2C
* - Barometer onboard for integrating with GPS altitude for vertical position hold within a foot or less.
* IMU Board has 9DOM, ADXL Gyros, AD Accel's and PNI Magnetometers, all read with a 16Bit ADC
* GPS Board is a typical Ublox LEA-5H board with 18mm ceramic patch antenna and supercapacitor backup
The very cool thing about booz though is it's just a derivation of Paparazzi, so all the current ground station, xml config files etc, are all compatible as is.
It does, i have one my in from of me, is called: QuadPowered.. But you know.. you are right, invansense gyros will cost 9 dlls more, so i will have to charge $189 dlls.. =(
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