MicroFly, an open source nanoquad, hit its Kickstarter funder target of $5,000 and will be funded. From the project page:
I've been inspired by the crew at bitcraze.se, where they are building a simple quadcopter at a tiny scale; every component is carefully selected to be mounted on the circuit board. The circuit board itself acts as a chassis for the quadcopter, and custom 3D printed components are used to mount the motors. The reason? To make it as small as possible, without redefining the quadcopter. I would like to do the same, but with some important differences.
So what makes my design different than other open source quadcopters?
In my design, I plan on using embedded WiFi, so the quadcopter can be controlled from a computer on a standard wireless network you might have at home. As a result, the quadcopter can go as far as your wifi signal stretches. This quadcopter is small, which inherently makes it excellent for indoor use.
The quadcopter will have redundant IMUs (Inertial Measurement Unit) to ensure a stable flight for the entire battery life. The Microfly will also run on a small lithium-ion battery that can be recharged from the USB port on your computer.
Does anyone understand the appeal of two parallel ("redundant") IMUs? I've never heard of that and don't really get why it's necessary.
Comments
Another obvious gap was if there's no position sensing, how can it be flown from a PC without proportional sticks?
Hi Chris,
in my new design "VR BRAIN" will be available also a redundant complete IMU : GYRO , ACC , MAGN , and not only the IMU :) in theory you can gain 3 db/m on S/N. My idea is to use the power of ARM to acquire raw data from the sensor up the available band of sensor. The Idea is to acquire two imu in same time with this tips.
So you can filter the data from two sensor and obtain better result.
This is a preview link : http://www.virtualrobotix.com/profiles/blogs/new-multipilot-for-rtf...
Best
Roberto
WRT redundant IMUs. There is little/no value in having "redundant" IMUs for a product in this categog. These parts are amazingly robust and just don't break. There could be value in "complementary" in us where the outputs of the sensors are compared in order to remove the noise component but there are other cheaper ways to do this.
I get the impression that the develoPer isn't that knowledgable and is throwing stuff against the wall to see what stick
For that price it would have been nice to see a working prototype and not just 3D renders of a board.
$600 was the price of something RTF, fully debugged. $300 was the price of a board with no software. Of course, he doesn't really know what the differences will be. Wifi is pretty standard, these days. What isn't standard are brushless motors, easily obtained counter rotating propellers, or autopilot. He never said what the wifi chip was. Overall, not completely flushed out, like most kickstarter projects.