Here's a really impressive DIY quadcopter from the smart guys at Let's Make Robots. It uses custom firmware running on a hacked Fonera wifi router and regular Wii sensors to fly with a joystick via wifi.
Atropos is remotely operated by a wifi link, powered by a Fonera router. The user can pilot the aircraft with a HTML5 and canvas web interface, making AJAX request on every key stroke or mouse movement. Telemetry is received with COMET (SERVER Push) HTTP information and Javascript is used to manage the entire page.
Fonera sends rotor commands to a 16F876 PIC, which generates PPM signals to manage ESC ( Electronic Speed Controllers). Those ESC are the power stage to trifasic motors.
To achieve very fast and less time consuming requests, http router web server has been modified on it's source code, to process all the AJAX requests in a RAM shared memory portion on the router.
via Hackaday
Comments
Well, control system is completely home made, because it runs into Fonera and is extremely experimental. It was my first PID tuning, and R/C experience.
Also, filter is not DCM or Kalman, but Simple Complementary :)
Cool but the stability in the video is lacking.