Pipopirate codebase started

michel pet May 2, 2011 at 7:46am

i am in i ordert 1

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 :)

SciFly February 19, 2011 at 8:56pm

Kudos to starting and following through the design process- however.......

With the exception of and at the cost of minitaurizing, I think you are attempting to reinvent the wheel while potentially taking a step backwards.

Its about the same price (95 w.o mag, or 120 w/ mag) as say the Ardupilot/IMU combo (130) and includes a mems 3-D mag- thats nice. I suppose with the added magnetometer, you are hoping to use this on a heli or quad.In airplanes with > a few Hz GPS I suppose its not critical.

About porting ardupirates code-could get tricky-what features are expecting to integrate specifically that are an improvement over say the Ardupilot/ ArduIMU code? If the reasons are few then why couldn't you port that code set instead of the ardupirates code? It may be more doable and appropriate given the limited resources (channels, lower res A/D, speed, registers, less memory, etc.).

Alternatively, if you run into hardware resource shortages, you could build an IMU board to run the DCM code(and other sensors) only and then stack an Ardupilot or Pipopirate less the IMU to run the nav software? You would have the same 2D footprint but with many more options. The cost of the nav board (mega328 + servo headers + MPX?) shouldn't kill the package price.Plus you would have a total of 2 USARTs for GPS telemetery etc (assuming you comme'd the two processors with a synchronous protocol).That does have the darwback of additional board design and associated costs.

Anyway, good luck and I wish you well. I hope that this project works out and that anything you build is indeed fruitful and profitable.

-JF

Home / http://www.quad.In

@@@@@ Wir bieten Ihnen in unserem Webshop von www.tempo.ag, quad Elektrofahrzeuge der besonderen Art an. Dazu Faltgaragen in allen Größen. @@@@@