UAir: Integrated Wireless Comms - Making life soo much easier! - Blogs

Here you can see the little guy we have just begun to use and will be releasing for sale in early October. The black Forebrain board is what was running the autopilot code in ROFL up till now, 72MHz ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller, measures 66mm*23mm. The longer Hivebrain board is what we will switch to and will bundle as an optional upgrade to Forebrain with the ROFL kits, it's the same Forebrain pinout, but with a surface-mounted Series 2 XBee module using an external antenna, measures 111mm*23mm. No more messing around with weirdly spaced Xbee module pins!

For now it is proving an absolute god-send for PID tuning and other tweaks...speeds the process up considerably, in flight it can be used for all sorts of telemetry transfer. I'll be using this system in my upcoming video guides and demonstrations for PID tuning.

Hello Greg!

This is something of a sneak preview of Hivebrain on DIY drones! It hasn't been added to our website yet. It's hot off the press (well, pcb equipment :-P) Shown in the picture (top) is a retail (black livery) Forebrain (here is the growing code/ software database). Beneath is the prototype Hivebrain which has just passed our testing phase and should be available for purchase in early October. Yep, it still needs an IMU, and is obviously best suited to Seraphim (also available early October).

We have thus far flown the Forebrain and Seraphim combo in a Parkzone Radian Glider, our ROFL quadcopter and our experimental airframe Talon. (Look out for past and future blogs on these, here on DIY drones) We are adding Seraphim software functionality and flight time continuously.

Hivebrain is basically a Forebrain with a surface mounted xbee module added. It therefore has all the capabilities of Forebrain but with wireless data transfer. We have been using it (in conjunction with a standard xbee module plugged into my laptop) to control all the PID values on the quadcopter in realtime whilst testing. On the Radian Glider we also used it for various navigation control inputs. Feel free to use our Forums or email me at henry@universalair.co.uk if you want more details!

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Developer

Mark Colwell September 13, 2011 at 3:25am

Greg, I got the Forebrain, took 10 days for delivery from UK. Nice tiny powerful board. Will fit well in a thin rocket !

I think Multipilot32 code should port over with small changes.
Henry Fletcher September 12, 2011 at 5:17am

Hello Greg!

This is something of a sneak preview of Hivebrain on DIY drones! It hasn't been added to our website yet. It's hot off the press (well, pcb equipment :-P) Shown in the picture (top) is a retail (black livery) Forebrain (here is the growing code/ software database). Beneath is the prototype Hivebrain which has just passed our testing phase and should be available for purchase in early October. Yep, it still needs an IMU, and is obviously best suited to Seraphim (also available early October).

We have thus far flown the Forebrain and Seraphim combo in a Parkzone Radian Glider, our ROFL quadcopter and our experimental airframe Talon. (Look out for past and future blogs on these, here on DIY drones) We are adding Seraphim software functionality and flight time continuously.

Hivebrain is basically a Forebrain with a surface mounted xbee module added. It therefore has all the capabilities of Forebrain but with wireless data transfer. We have been using it (in conjunction with a standard xbee module plugged into my laptop) to control all the PID values on the quadcopter in realtime whilst testing. On the Radian Glider we also used it for various navigation control inputs. Feel free to use our Forums or email me at henry@universalair.co.uk if you want more details!
Greg Fletcher September 11, 2011 at 6:43pm

I have not heard of this board before. What does it do? You still need an IMU board? Any software?

This reply was deleted.