Today's Developer is Olivier Adler, who works with John Arne Birkeland on the PPM encoder team. I already described the PPM encoder project in detail here, so I'll just turn this over to Olivier!
Name: Olivier Adler
Home: The city of Troyes, in North-East France, about 150 Km from Paris. We are in the region of Champagne. Here's a famous house in Troyes:
Day Job : Technical director in my company ( FRANCE IP ) where I manage the telephony platform and client servicing.
Project activity : New ppm encoder programming (ArduCoder) with John Arne, hardware testing / design adviser.
Background : Audio recording engineer, servicing specialist. CNC machines design and Mach3 project helper. Expert RC 1/8 car pilot (30 years ago).
Interests: Electronic design / service - mechanic design and machining - radio links - optical fiber links - computing - photography - RC models
Fun things : My old experience with RC car competitions gave me the bad habits of extensively testing models before to drive or to fly. It's like this after discovering a small glitch inside the ppm encoder that i entered the Arducopter team as a programmer helper and hardware tester for the new ArduCoder ppm encoder. Always interested by technical stuff, I began RC modeling when i was about 10 years old, 31 years ago. I tried boats, planes, helicopters, cars, buggy..
At about 15 years old, I was expert 1/8 RC car pilot, sometimes racing in the France Championship, but not too long because of the weight of studies. After sound engineer studies in Belgium, I became technical director in a couple of well known French recording studio facilities. As I was more comfortable creating things, rather than servicing big mixing desks and tape recording machines I started the design and manufacturing of CNC interfaces for 3 to 6 axis millers based on the open source MACH3 project.
I helped on this project for general testing and submitted the idea to use Modbus protocol who is now widely used for interfacing PLCs or modbus devices like tools changer with Mach3. Then I founded FRANCE IP, a local telephony provider. After 31 years without any RC activity, I found Multicopters very interesting, and decided to start this hobby. I started watching at the Mikrokopter commercial project then i did find the Arducopter 2 project, and decided i would start with it because of full opening freedom and very promising future.
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SPRAYING MULTICOPTERS
A chinese friend does this very well !!!
hi,my name is shawngu,i work for a agriculture automation agency in china. basically,we provide automation solutions for billions of chinese farmers to improve their farming efficiency. see,china is a big agricultural nation,so the profit in this area is really big.currently,our major interest is spraying crops by UAVs.and a lot of local government agencies are very intersted in our idea.however,there is no company in china currently capable of providing this kind of UAVs. lately,i came across the arducopter website and downloaded the source code.i figured the your copter has great potential to become the solution to our goal. we would like to invite you to be the product supplier and we want to act as an agent of your copter in china. if you are interested in this idea,please contact me .i'm really looking forward to hearing from you!
Hello Olivier
I have a situation here with the PPM encoder or I think it is PPM encoder. I have stated the problem here
http://code.google.com/p/ardupilot-mega/wiki/Encoder
I would be happy like a kid if you could help!
BEst Regards
Tout récepteur classique avec sortie servo PWM convient très bien.
Parfois l'ancien firmware encoder PPM pose problème avec certains récepteurs, dans ce cas il faut le mettre à jour avec le nouveau firmware ArduPPM.
Olivier
Bonjour,
étant nouveau dans sur ce site, et intérrais par ce projet, je voulais savoir s'il faut un recepteur avec sortie PPM ou PCM pour ce brancher sur ArduPilot Mega, ayant actuelement une Futaba FF9 en 72 Mhz avec recepteur PPM.
Merci
Didier.
Thanks to all for you kind comments, i didn't saw that my profile was online since 3 weeks !
Ravi,
The latest Arducoder firmware (0.9.83) is able to work in PPM passthrough mode. This means that in this mode your receiver signal is directly sent to the APM PPM decoder. You need to read the code manual to enable this mode, and if you decide to flash you firmware (ISP programming mode) you need to know that there is a small but existing risk to brick your ppm encoder chip if something goes wrong.
There is no pre decoding of your ppm signal, it needs to be in the right format to be understood by the APM main processor. To my knowledge there are not many different ppm formats. There are at least two parameters than can change from an rc system to another : channel number and frame period.
Normally, your receiver should send a 8 channel format to be compatible with the APM board. I've sucessfully tested this, using a Jeti satellite receiver with ppm output and setting it to 8 channel ppm format.
The frame rate is normaly around 50 Hz, but can be a bit less on some RC systems. I think that if you have a value around 40 - 50 hz it should works. Jason could perhaps confirm this, he fully master the main APM code, i don't have much knowledge yet on it.
Last, if the ppm encoder loose your ppm signal, it will replace it by a internaly generated one, with the ppm encoder programmed failsafe values.
We are interested to have feedback on this new ppm encoder firmware as fast as possible, so that we can put it in production. John Arne and me think that it is more reliable than the previous one, and a lot more tolerant to "difficult receivers" like the FR-Sky one or multiplexed pwm types.
happy flying !!
Olivier ADLER
hi oliver, one more step you have contributed to make more reliable APM. i have an APM2.22 for which i am using thomas scharre 433 MHz Rx which has a PPM ready output on one of the pins. can you give a little guidance to me how can i give this PPM to APM 2.22 directly. The Rx takes PPM signal from a Futaba 7C in which i have replaced the the 2.4Ghz Rf module with a Thomas Sharre 433Mhz Rf module. it would be an interesting project if you can share some of your expertize. actually i am more of an aircraft structural engineer and less into electronic hardware.
Nice to meet you Olivier!
Nice to meet you Oliver! ;)
+1
Maximus
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