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The PX4flow is expensive, heavy, & fragile.  Its sonar module is insufficient, so you need to replace it with a more powerful module.    Replacing the MB1043 with an MB1240 & translating the serial protocol from cm to mm is required.  Only the UART output of the sonar is used.


The trick is the more powerful module outputs a different protocol, so you need to pass the sonar readouts through the mane microcontroller to be translated & then to the PX4flow.  There's also the glue logic to invert the UART voltage.

The PX4flow is liberated from its inferior sonar module & useless headers.

Replacement sonar signal & mane I/O are connected.

  More powerful sonar module & glue logic.

Sonar, PX4flow, flight computer, & bluetooth are soldered in the navigation test harness.


The Turnigy Microquad has the highest capacity for its size.

It's single sided PC boards, conventionally routed.  No 3D printing, laser cutting, or anything else.

 The landing gear is made out of PC board standoffs.

The motor mounts need a lot more reinforcement.  Some guys glue on carbon fiber or plywood doublers.

It has enough clearance for the PX4flow.  The battery needs to go on top, over the mane board. 

Taking a page from the AR Drone, the battery is used to weigh down the IMU. 

It's the most energetic platform so far, definitely not a toy.  Those Turnigy 1811-2900's get a lot more thrust from the same space as brushed motors.

  The PX4FLOW's 1st flight


Based on the previous video of the TCM8230 over carpet, the PX4FLOW is a huge improvement.  It actually holds position quite well over plush carpet & below 1m.

The sonar still has issues above 1m.  It glitches to 5m when it can't detect a reflection. Sometimes you want it to send 0 when it reads 5m & sometimes you want it to repeat the previous reading when it reads 5m.  It still glitches, despite this algorithm.


It's very heavy, so it handles the wind quite well.  Crashes require a lot of repairs & propellers.  It's every bit as crash prone & fragile as expected.  Every day of flying requires a bag of propellers.  The propeller mounts tend to break off.

It's time to fuse a barometer with the sonar to try to improve the range over carpet.

 The jesus barometer goes on.

& gets earplug foam insulation.  Earplugs are decent sources of breathable foam.


The temperature compensated MS5611 output

 

 is compared with the raw MB1240 output

in a 1m flight over carpet.  Despite the temperature compensation, the MS5611 has a huge amount of drift, leading to 1m of unknown absolute error.  Its short term relative readings are quite good for something that measures air pressure.


For the 1st time, you can see just how many sonar readings are invalid.  It generates 7650 when it knows the reading is invalid, but sometimes it errors low.  It never seems to error high.


The object of the game is to fuse the air pressure & sonar readings to eliminate the errors.  Sonar still has to be the master.

In this flight, the last 10 pressure readings are averaged & normalized to the average of the last 10 sonar readings to compensate for temperature drift.  The most recent pressure reading is subtracted from the average pressure & scaled to mm to get the most recent altitude based on pressure.


The algorithm doesn't produce any glitches, but is very noisy compared to sonar.  You want to use sonar if the sonar change is under 100mm.  If it's over 100mm, use air pressure. 

A flight using fused sensors for guidance was very smooth, but overshot the altitude changes a lot more.  It switched to pressure, which lagged sonar.  The sudden altitude changes due to glitches were gone, but there were audible glitches in motor speed.




The PX4flow has presented a case of far sightedness.  It's most accurate at 1m altitude.  Below 1m altitude, it has a very hard time detecting position.  Above 1m, the sonar falls over.  The focus can be adjusted for lower altitude, but it has to fly in a narrow altitude band.  That's the price of a very high magnification, high brightness lens which can detect surface features from far away.


A 2nd camera would have benefited the low altitudes, but there wasn't enough time to discover the PX4flow limits & design a 2 camera optical flow solution.








 That's probably the most aggressively something has ever flown itself using optical flow.  Optical flow has previously just been used for aiding a human pilot in a hover.


 So the PX4flow has a very low top speed.  The horizontal velocity has to be limited to 0.25m/s.  Vertical velocity has to be limited to 0.1m/s.  The mane problem is what kind of carpet it has.  Its top speed in the plush apartment carpet seemed to be higher than the finely colored office carpet.  The mane problem with altitude is it's clearly switching to the barometer more for high speeds & the barometer has much more lag.



The flight time with the PX4flow weighing it down was slightly better than the Syma X1 at 7 minutes.




The power distribution on the microquad interferes with the magnetometer.  It needs to be on a mast.