This is the second post I have made that is an update to my initial project design to make my fully autonomous aircraft. Our team has made a fair amount of decision making sense my previous post. Just for reference, the official name of our project is now "FlySpy".Airplane Selection:We have chosen the Easy Glider Pro from multiplex. Although it does not have as much internal space as the Easy Star, we fell that ailerons were a must for our application which Easy Star doesn't have. We have completely assembled the airplane and have flown it once. (No one on our team has experience flying RC Airplanes so we have an official pilot from a local UAV Imaging company. It would be nice for someone on our team to have experience flying but we do not want to use our project as a test dummy.) We are using the Power Pack and Servo pack that are made for the Easy Glider Pro. The motor seems beefy enough to support a flight with our components added to its weight so we do not intend on buying a bigger one.Battery : EVOLITE Li-Po 7.4V 2500mAh BatteryAutopilot Module Component Selection:Microcontroller - Microchip PIC24FJ256GA1103 Axis Accelerometer - Analog Devices ADCL3302 Axis Gyro - InvenSense IDG 300Barometer - VTI Technologies SCP 1000Range Finder - LV-MaxSonar-EZ1 Sonar Range FinderGPS Module - uBlox LEA-4P and getting Sarantel SL 1201 (Geohelix P2)SD Card Slot - TBDI have obtained a Niko Cool Pix s7c from a friend to use as an onboard camera. I am still working on decoding its push button pins so our Micro can turn it on/off and control the shutter.Topics we are contemplating:Powering Autopilot Devices - Everything that we are using runs off a 3.3V Vdd. We are uncertain if it would be okay to use the power rail coming out of the speed controller and sending it to a voltage regulator. We estimate our devices drawing about 157mA when everything is operating. Is this the usual solution or do we need to run off of two battery sources?Gyro & Accelerometer Data - I am still in the process of researching what are the best algorithms to fuse the data between the gyro and accelerometer to get a good orientation reading.If you are interested in looking at our progress, you can always look at our team website. Or if you want to go more in detail about my day to day discovery, you can look at my notebook.
I will be using the rangefinder for landing. I will be descending until my rangefinder senses land below. Thereafter I will use try to use my alierons as flaps once I get close enough to the ground. I think 20 feet is a good range. I plan on my chip using the barometric sensor until this can take over.
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What are you using the range finder for? During landing to detect height above the ground? They are only valid to about 20 feet.
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