Pipopirate codebase started

bcr February 21, 2011 at 12:04pm

Nice, clean, simple design. Very elegant. And good riddance to the arduino overhead.

Erez R February 20, 2011 at 6:50am

There are a total of 16 free IO channels. They can easily be configured for either Input or output.

It was conceived at first as a Pwm-in Pwm-out (Pipo) stabilization platform so yes, that it does really well. I'll upload a video of it stabilizing a pseudo-camera later today.

The real challenge is making it into a full fledged AP. Which I will :)

Coby February 20, 2011 at 6:27am

Nice work Erez. Very interesting. And small enough it looks like you could run three of these in about the same footprint as one APM. Are you building for stabilization, position/altitude hold? That seems to be all the PWM I/O you have - 6 channels? Or is that eight channels out I see? If you can do stabilization, alt/pos hold plus two channel camera stabilization it would be perfect for many use cases. I would be very interested in helping test your stuff. I run a nonprofit that is doing research on current open source mutli-rotor capabilities to support aerial photo/mapping for humanitarian work.

Erez R February 19, 2011 at 10:10pm

Hi guys,

First up. This is a very preliminary code. It will get better.

GPS, camera, etc will be added later on.

Just to be clear. I'm not trying to compete with the Ardupilot/ArduIMU. They'll always have more memory. If I wanted to do that I'd have made a board with a Cortex MCU (read - pipo v3).

This one is designed with a couple ideas in mind.

1) SMALL. Guys, I just weighed it and it came out to 6 grams! Kinda lighter than the other options.

2) On board MEMS sensors. No wiring and/or soldering to deal with.

3) The sensors' output is digital. Hence the ADC resolution does not matter.

This board is small and light enough to be used as a camera stabilization platform, a FPV assist platform, a Heli FBL controller and more. The ardupirates code is just the beginning :)