Hello all, (relative) newcomer here. I'm working on a FPV project with abit of a different control mechanism, that I hope to piece-by-piece get up to "UAV" status. Instead of a traditional RC TX/RX setup, I decided to go with a USB joystick ran through one of of sparkfun's USB host shields. This goes to an arduino, which does the USB processing and sends control commands over an Xbee. A picture is worth a thousand words:
What's inside the box, you may ask? Just an ATX power supply. Sadly, there wasn't even room for the arduino in there along with it... oh well.
Things are going well for my project though, and I hope to be putting in my order for the easystar sometime next week. Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.
Comments
Thanks for your description
I will also follow with interest your project
best wishes
1. Thanks for the tip, I will keep that in mind.
2. It's actually one of the 60mW ones good for (supposedly) 1500m range - regardless, I don't plan on flying much beyond 500m LOS or so.
I haven't seen any latency issues with the testing I've been doing - the servos on the other end seem to respond well even to very sudden changes in the position of the joystick.
@tshado
The hardware on the ground station end is pretty much what you see above: an arduino mega, a Sparkfun USB host controller shield, and a cheap Saitek joystick, which all works together to output control commands to the plane via the Xbee.
The plane-side stuff isn't quite final yet, but currently it consists of an arduino duemilanove doing PWM to an ESC and the servos. I also bought a cheap CMOS camera off of ebay that I plan to connect to a 500mW 900Mhz RX/TX from DPCAV. It's nothing top-of-the-line, but it should be just fine for my needs of flying around the park for an hour or three ;].
1. Be careful firing up one xbee that is transmitting before the other xbee is turned on. They seem to be able to flood their buffer with data and not want to link up sometimes.
2. Range. I use mine for helicopters and dont fly it at extreme range. I considered it for my fixed wing platforms, but the datasheet is pretty accurate - you get 300m and thats all. If thats ok for your application then you will do fine.
I havent used a usb joystick, i just used some old sticks from a 4 channel R/C unit and used them direct to an arduino via the a/d pins.
Any idea if you will have a latency issue with having a USB conversion going on in the middle? I guess you will find out!
Great project, look forward to seeing progress - happy to share notes from my system if you need it.
Interesting project !!
Could you give more technical questions on your setup :
- what are the hardware parts you are using ?
- how are you going to control the plane servos ?
- i saw you plan to perform FPV
Have you found a "good" camera and RX/TX video
Best regards,
Jean-Claude