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My own DIY drone, complete with LabView 'Ground Station'

Posted by Bill Porter on April 13, 2010 at 5:37pm
Hey guys. I wanted to post this as a 'Thank you' to the community for the ideas and open source code on this site.

My girlfriend came to me, she needed an idea for a project in her LabView class. At the time, I was working on my SAGAR autonomous robot. I showed her the ArduPilot Ground Station and off she went writing her own for my robot.



I developed a communications protocol using NMEA style sentences and gave her the specifications. We worked together on a few things, like the 3D rendering of orientation, and how to plot two points on Google Earth. We would not have gotten far without looking through Ground Station source.

So, Thanks guys for everything you do.

Any other details on the interface or my SAGAR robot, can be found on my site www.billporter.info.
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Comments

  • Bill Porter April 16, 2010 at 5:55am
    @Darryl - I used THIS plugin to export to stl file. It integrated with sketchup just fine, so it most support plugins in some way.

    @Morli - Most definitely, but it's still undergoing some tweaking. If you watch the top of the panel (the Error Msg box), you will see my robot complains a-lot about the messages it receives from Labview. That was a timing bug we just figured out. We have also been tiding up and optimizing the block diagram. All ASCII parsing is done with only two 'Scan String for Tokens' boxes now.
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    Morli April 15, 2010 at 8:26pm
    Nice GCS Bill, if you can share the code for it , i am sure many(me included) will highly appreciate it. Thanks.
  • Darryl Uchitil April 15, 2010 at 7:47pm
    Bill,
    Thanks for the SKP. Last time I played with Sketchup, someone has a 3D mouse to show(www.3dconnexion.com). Now I wish I had one of those. Played with Sketchup yesterday, without watching tutorials. Got something reasonable on the screen using orthogonal view, then looked at the 3-view and saw a lot of problems. Guess I will have to work through the tutorials.
    You mentioned that you found some file-conversion plug-ins. I thought the free version did not support plugins. Or did you find them elsewhere?
    Darryl
  • Bill Porter April 14, 2010 at 9:11pm
    Sketchup is nice, and free, but it took a little time to get the hang of. Watching the tutorial videos really helped.

    Here's my SKP file
    http://www.billporter.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/SAGARskp.zip
  • Darryl Uchitil April 14, 2010 at 7:41pm
    Very nice ground station. I like the 3D representation of the rover I am working on a lawn rover, using a java-based dashboard. I have not used Sketchup, could you send your SKP file?
    -Darryl
  • Bill Porter April 13, 2010 at 8:06pm
    I used Google sketch-up to draw out my robot in 3D, and found a plug-in that will export the drawing to a stl file.

    Then I played with some of the built in functions for loading an stl file and manipulating it.

    Here's the vi I created to figure out the 3D image if you are curious.

    3DSagar.zip

    The actual data comes from a Honeywell compass on the robot that outputs pitch and roll data. Unfortunately, it is noisy. I might have to play around with damping it sometime in the future, or just add gyros.
    http://www.billporter.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/3DSagar.zip
  • Eric April 13, 2010 at 7:37pm
    Hey Bill,

    Your ground station looks awesome!

    How did you guys go about displaying the 3d orientation of your system?

    - Eric
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