I've been working on an open source autopilot for a while now. It's not finished yet but it's getting close. The board is quite small - about the size of an ESC - and weighs 10g.
Features:* Plugs directly into any R/C receiver - up to nine control channels.* Can control up to ten servos.* Combined GPS/IR leveler board makes installation easy.* Barometric altimeter.* microSD card for flight plans and data storage.* Fully open source software. You can improve it or change it however you like.* Easily reprogrammed via USB with no need for a special programmer.* Powerful on-board flight scripting language.* Optional radio link to the ground.* Optional 9-axis IMU.* Many expansion options including I2C, SPI, etc.* Powerful ARM7 processorBy the way this is an open source project - not a commercial project - so please don't ask me for release dates or free samples!The autopilot software is at:http://code.google.com/p/flyingfox/My original (kinda old) build thread is at:http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=734791
The full advantage is that you don't need the FTDI chip (reducing cost, size and not wasting a valuable serial port) and the speed is a lot faster. Also you can program the USB to perform other task not just for programing. For example a bridge to an external EEPROM for datalogging, and the PC will recognize it like normal flash USB memory.
About the ADC's i still in love with ARM cortex, it has 12-bit ADC's, controlled by DMA... ;-)
Hi Rasit, yes the new version is different. I'm planning to check in the 1.0 hardware design once it's been verified working. For now the 1.0 hardware is new and untested.
Any chance of a picture of the bottom? The quality of this board is amazing...I can't believe you're doing one-offs. Maybe we should produce and sell them for you?
Someone asked about the script language: it's a C interpreter I wrote for Flying Fox called picoc. I've spent the last few months writing it and making it into a really solid general purpose C interpreter for embedded systems. It's already being used in a couple of other projects: a computer vision robot and an embedded monitor.
The language looks just like standard C so anyone familiar with C/C++/Java/Javascript will find it a breeze to program in.
The circular sensor is (as Brian says) a barometric pressure sensor called an HP03 from Hope RF. It's cheap and has reasonable accuracy.
The microSD card is on the bottom, as are quite a few other components.
Brian, I used to use Olimex (from Bulgaria) for PCBs but now that I'm doing high-density four-layer PCBs they don't have the facilities for that. Now I'm using a Chinese company Myro PCB who can handle my more complex PCBs with multiple layers, very fine feature size and small via sizes.
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About the ADC's i still in love with ARM cortex, it has 12-bit ADC's, controlled by DMA... ;-)
the eagle files are versioned as 0.92, but the picture shows version 1.0. Are they any different?
--Rasit
The language looks just like standard C so anyone familiar with C/C++/Java/Javascript will find it a breeze to program in.
The google code project for picoc is here: http://code.google.com/p/picoc/
The circular sensor is (as Brian says) a barometric pressure sensor called an HP03 from Hope RF. It's cheap and has reasonable accuracy.
The microSD card is on the bottom, as are quite a few other components.
Brian, I used to use Olimex (from Bulgaria) for PCBs but now that I'm doing high-density four-layer PCBs they don't have the facilities for that. Now I'm using a Chinese company Myro PCB who can handle my more complex PCBs with multiple layers, very fine feature size and small via sizes.
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