While we work on ArduPilot's big brother (Mega), we wanted it to have a little brother, too: a cheap and easy entry-level autopilot.
The best way to do that is with a tried-and-true design, a turn-rate-limiter. The way these work is that they have a yaw gyro and a GPS. The yaw gyro stabilizes the plane, based on the correlation between bank and yaw (it works best with relative stable aircraft, ideally those that are flown with the rudder rather than ailerons, such as the EasyStar or many high-wing trainers). Meanwhile the GPS corrects for yaw gyro drift and handles navigation. It's not meant for FunJets and flying wings, but for the kind of relatively stable aircraft most newcomers start with, it can perform well and be very easy to set up.
One example of this style is the UNAV PicoPilot, which was designed nearly a decade ago. We thought it was time to come out with a modern version, based on the faster GPS modules and better gyros available today, and make it open source.
Ideally it would be priced well under $200 with everything all included. It's USB-native and self-contained, requiring no additional parts--it just a shield that plugs on top of the current ArduPilot, so it can use the standard groundstation and configuration utilities.
The above image shows the board design, which is close to going into prototype production. We may switch GPS modules to the 5Hz Locosys (Mediatek) module before we release it (cheaper, possibly better performance with the small patch antenna), and we're going to test the 25mm ceramic patch antenna vs the 18mm antenna to see how much difference they make.
Jeff Turner and Scott Plunkett are leading this team, with board tweaking by Jordi Munoz.
We'd love your feedback at this stage!
The Eagle files are here:
Comments
I too see the need for a simpler autopilot but the concept that seems great to me is from the example that Jose Julio uses for his quadcopter. He demonstrates well that the ArduIMU with the PPM encoder can very easily do a great job of being an ADHRS/Autopilot system along with a separately mounted GPS which really seems reasonable. To me, adding the PPM encoder chips to the ArduIMU board really seems like a great combo for a system simpler/cheaper than ArduMEGA.
while having a closer look to the schematics, i found, that the AN5 Pin is used for monitoring the power supply.
I would suggest to use another ADC pin for that. The AN5 can be used as I2C (TWI) pin which may be helpful in integrating other peripherals (e.g. a Compass sensor).
One suspicious point: Compared to JP1 on the ardupilot board, the pin numbering is reversed. Is there something mirrored?
Can't wait until end of summer though. Ordering similar bits an pieces tonight.
Troy
@Nick ETA is pretty soon. Boards will be sent out to beta testers in about 2 weeks so it will definitely be ready before summer!
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