Blogs

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones

Comments

  • Chris November 14, 2010 at 3:46am
    qcontrol + apm seems pretty close to me
  • T.D. Gonzales November 11, 2010 at 7:24pm
    That is a really nice ground control station. I'm sure that the system could be designed to adapt to changes in CoG pretty easy. The military does it since well thats what privates and specialists are for.

    These guys have what looks like a pretty good team. Although it seems like they just have a very limited platform with a max payload of 150g for the payload.
  • Developer
    Doug Weibel November 11, 2010 at 7:21pm
    #1 - I really dig the case. It would be even better if the wing were in the foam cut-out on the lid and the laptop were in a foam cutout on the bottom.

    #2 - Actually, we are really close to this right now.
    Minor differences: Our mission planner still has a few bugs, but does provide point and click waypoint planning, our groundstart required you to level the plane, but this could be rewritten to only cal the gyros and not the accels (we do that now on ArduCopter), we don't do shake to start, we just flip a switch on the transmitter. Only significant difference is that we don't have on the fly command uplink just yet (but it won't be long)

    #3 - shake 3 times should not result in tumbled gyros. Gyros should only "tumble" if the rotation rate saturates them. Shaking back and forth does not involve rotation. Of course if you shake it like a can of spray paint, then the IMU might tumble, but it is hard to do that with a whole airplane.

    #4 - I don't know about the shake to launch, but I am planning on a throw to launch enhancement that will start the motor when the IMU "sees" the acceleration of a hand launch.
  • Paul Mather November 11, 2010 at 6:16pm
    I think the price is $10K....
  • Jason Lyons November 11, 2010 at 5:36pm
    "From my point of view, starting the motor while shaking the plane isnt very clever. How to stop it again? Do you have first start your computer and GCS, holding the plane with the other hand?"

    The battery looks pretty easy to unplug.
  • T3
    Rory Paul November 11, 2010 at 3:51pm
    Shake my UAV three times before launch results in tumbled gyros ; (
  • Mauro Rodriguez November 11, 2010 at 3:19pm
    Nice! price?
  • T3
    Mark Griffin November 11, 2010 at 3:00pm
    There is nothing new with this senseFly. The Paparazzi open-source system can do this quite easily. Just need to program the flight plan appropriately.
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson November 11, 2010 at 2:09pm
    Absolutely. The APM 2.0 strategy includes adaptive gain setting and increased use of AI to "sense" as many of the setup parameters as possible. But as long as we're offering something that you can put in any aircraft, large small, delta, conventional, fixed wing rotary wing, etc...there's always going to be some setup process.

    All the UAVs that are that are RTF are sold as part of an aircraft, and they're pre-tuned for that specific airframe. On some of the miltary UAVs like the Predator, you need to manually retune the autopilot when you add new payloads, because the CoG has changed.
  • Uwe Gartmann November 11, 2010 at 1:34pm
    From my point of view, starting the motor while shaking the plane isnt very clever. How to stop it again? Do you have first start your computer and GCS, holding the plane with the other hand?

    The rest is more ore less easy. You have to calibrate the horizontal attitude (acc) once and store this in the eeprom. The gyros are calibrated when the plane lies in the gras, waiting for GPS data. Then you start, go to the first waypoint.

    Did someone recognize, that on the senseFly GCS no flight instruments are showed. Why fill up the screen with huge graphics, when you can display values as letters or bars? This will eliminate much of the painful work developing GCS software.

    just my 2 cents
This reply was deleted.