Blogs

I am very excited to present ObliX to you! ObliX is my multirotor-blimp-drone idea, which will hopefully combine the flight time endurance of a blimp with the agile dynamics of a quadcopter.

The largest dimension of this hybrid-blimp would measure about 3 m and the lifting force of the helium volume would be close to 3 kg.
Starting to build ObliX, I decided to make a development blog about it. To be able to present and discuss the progress in just the way I like, I thought it might be a good idea to make my own website for it. So here it goes:

http://danielwibbing.wix.com/oblix

It would be awesome if you would have a look at my website and support the develop ObliX with your comments. Maybe you would even like to become a member of the development team? Go ahead and contact me!

Congrats to star DIY Drones member Lian Pin Koh for this great article in today's New York Times!

Belize has made a great effort to protect its coral reef system — the largest in the Western Hemisphere — by establishing more than a dozen protected areas. But patrolling large stretches of ocean and coastline and enforcing fishing regulations takes time, people and boats.

Or drones.

In June, the Wildlife Conservation Society began training operators from the Belize Fisheries Department to use two drones to help track illegal fishing activities. The drones went into use just at the start of lobster season.

This is only the beginning, said Julio R. Maaz, community fisheries coordinator for the conservation society in Belize, who hopes the drones will prove a cost-effective way to “monitor our national waters.”

And it is just one example of the growing use of drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, in conservation.

The military use of armed drones is well known and contentious. But the use of much smaller unmanned planes, closer in size to the remote-controlled planes hobbyists fly, is spreading into all sorts of areas, particularly when they are equipped with cameras.

Drones have been used to monitor seabird populations off Australia and rain forests in Indonesia, to study caribou and their effects on vegetation in Greenland, to combat poaching in Nepal and to conduct other conservation work in Madagascar, Gabon and other countries.

Their use in Belize was made possible by the conservation society and ConservationDrones.org, a small two-year-old nonprofit run by a researcher in Australia that has been a force in promoting their use in places like Belize.

So far, said Lian Pin Koh, a founder of the group, it has built about 100 drones for use in a dozen or so countries. They can detect habitat damage over wide areas, spot signs of illegal activity and help count populations of animals in remote areas.

Dr. Koh — who was born in Singapore, studied in Europe, and received his Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton — said he started the group because of the plight of orangutans and because of his hobby. “I fly remote-controlled aircraft,” he said.

“About two years ago,” he said, “a colleague and myself started talking about problems facing orangutans.” The expansion of oil palm plantations was destroying the habitat of the apes in Sumatra. He thought, why not attach a camera to “a toy plane.” He suggested it to Serge Wich, a founder of ConservationDrones.org. They outfitted their first conservation drone and reported on the surveys of the rain forest they conducted with it.

“That led many of our colleagues to contact us,” Dr. Koh said. “They wanted to build their own drones, so we started traveling around the world and building them and starting up programs.

“Now we have a whole fleet of conservation drones built for different purposes,” he said. “The ones we built for Belize were specifically designed to withstand the harsh saltwater environment.”

Dr. Maaz said the drones would be used for about six months to monitor various locations daily. Then the Fisheries Department will step back and assess the results.

“Expectations are very high in Belize,” Dr. Maaz said. “There’s so much we can do and need to do.”

This CreativeLive online video course, featuring top experts, is live and open to all today from 9:00am to 4:00pm PST.  It will cost money after that, so if you want a free taste now check it out here. 

Capture stunning aerial shots.

Aerial photography and videography captures some of the most stunning images out there, but the tools, techniques, and gadgets used to capture the action are often confusing and difficult to master. Join Jeff Foster and special guests for an exciting and highly informative class and get a running start at unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photography.

In this course, you'll learn how to capture stunning aerial shots with an impressive range of aerial gear – including; 3D Robotics multicopters, DJI multirotors, GoPros, DSLRs and more. You'll get an introduction to the best tools for beginners and see demonstrations of the sophisticated gear used by the most in-demand professional photographers and filmmakers. You’ll learn essential skills for controlling a UAV flight; basic flight controls, necessary equipment for successful shooting, planning and lining up the perfect shots, flight prep and safety, waypoint navigation and more. You'll gain an understanding of the production and post-production techniques unique and essential to aerial photography – including how to stabilize video, create stunning panoramic photos, and remove lens distortion in your photos and videos.

If you're ready to explore this wonderful world from a new elevated visual perspective, then this is the course for you!

Guests include: 
Colin Guinn - 3drobotics.com
Mark Johnson and Romeo Dursher - www.visual-aerials.com
Stephen Wheatcraft - www.aerovisionpro.com
Peter Sachs - dronelawjournal.com
Russell Brown - russellbrown.com

Time Magazine makes a good point about why the new generation of drone pilots are getting in trouble in a way the previous RC hobbyists didn't:

Learning to build and fly R/C aircraft was once a time-consuming, arduous process, factors that kept the hobby from spreading. Now, new technology like user-friendly quadcopter designs, equipped with smaller, high-powered motors and batteries, means that pilots can have their aircraft ready to go in minutes instead of days, greatly enhancing the appeal of the hobby. And while the old-school pilots often met in clubs, which enforced flight rules as a social norm, the newbies are buying their gear off Amazon and heading out solo.

But the real issue here is that many of the new designs come with cameras attached, a feature that has fundamentally changed why people fly model aircraft. Though some old-school R/C aircraft hobbyists experimented with DIY digital camera hookups, they mostly viewed building and flying their aircraft as the endgame of their project. They generally avoided risky flying, as that could cost their club permission to use the local park, or could damage their expensive, intricate model aircraft that took hours to build.

The new wave of hobbyists see their GoPro-equipped drones less as remote-controlled aircraft and more as flying cameras, set to embark on a cinematic adventure. Flying for the sake of flying is no longer the point — the point is getting awesome YouTube footage, which leads to riskier behavior.

Nice press for the Hexo+ team from Canadian TV after their $1.3 million Kickstarter campaign. They used Iris to prototype their platform.

MONTREAL -- Like a well-trained dog, the HEXO+ follows you faithfully wherever you go.

But it doesn't walk besides you -- it's airborne.

Developed by a French start-up, Squadrone System, the six-rotor HEXO+ -- which handily totes a GoPro video camera -- is billed as the first autonomous small drone for the mass market.

It's also a prime example of the many ways in which automation will take to the sky as unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, become part of daily life in the not-too-distant future.

Due out in May 2015 with a planned retail price of US$899, the HEXO+ is targeted at extreme sports enthusiasts looking for a way to immortalize their every move.

Users activate it with a smartphone app, then let it fly a few meters (yards) behind them, recording their every twist and turn, up to a top speed of 70 kilometers an hour.

"Making snowboard films is my main activity, so essentially I started using drones a few years ago," said Squadrone System's co-founder Xavier Delerue, a former world snowboard champion.

"At the outset, it was great. It was easy. It was going to change everything -- and then I quickly realized taking good images involved a lot of logistics when it came to using a drone," he told AFP.

 

I've never owned a quadcopter, but have often thought of getting one. I work in the remote robotics industry and have been a fan of quadcopters, FPV and personal "drones" for years. That may change, though, if what I experienced yesterday is what we can expect in the future.

My wife and I were at the beach most of the day yesterday. There were probably a hundred other people in our small area, mostly families with kids. People had their awnings set up, bar-b-ques grilling, and kids running around just having fun. About mid afternoon a fellow showed up with a DJI Phantom (I recognized it because I often thought of buying one) and full FPV gear, not 10 feet from where my wife and I were, and not more than 30 feet from all the kids running around. He then launched and flew the drone up and down the beach, sometimes hovering over people, sometimes flying over boats and paddleboards that were passing by.

While I was in the water, his drone buzzed over my head, hovering maybe 5 feet away from me and stayed there. Just out of reach but definitely "studying me" like a buzzing giant mosquito. It was my first experience like this and I gotta tell you, it was creepy.   I don't know this guy. I don't know his flying skills. I don't know how well he maintains his equipment. I don't know if he's shooting video of me and, if he is, what he plans on doing with that video.  Is he a convict?  Is he a child molester?  I know nothing about this guy who is flying his quad just feet above me and is watching me so intently.  The one thing I did know was that this guy's drone was invading my space and my privacy.  He was watching (and probably videoing me) and I didn't like it. And I'm a guy, I can only imagine how I would have felt if I were a woman. Or a parent watching this drone hover over my small child.  In that brief moment my feelings about personal drones reversed 180 degrees.

If what I just witnessed is the future of the technology, where people no can no longer live with any degree of privacy or space, I, for one, can no longer support it.

A few months ago we were invited by a Non Government Organisation to fly at a hill resort. They are exploring the possibility to use drone equipped with camera or Gopro to monitor the status of the forest reserve.    

Until recently, in the name of development and some “Unknown” reason, a lot of pristine forest has been clear for human activity such as farming, residential and commercial purpose. A recent finding also suggest that the only water catchment area may be in danger of being clear by some un-responsible party.

Since this is a high altitude mountain area, road access is limited. Effective monitoring of the forest reserve had been an uphill task for the organization. But now they may have a new weapon to level the fighting ground - Low cost UAV.

Our test flight area is about 1400 Meter ASL, from there, our drone has to climb for another 800 meter before heading to the first waypoint to avoid  terrain.

We are using Skywalker 2014 power by a 4S 6000 Mah battery and 2814-8 1000 kv T-motor. When I hit RTL to climb for altitude, I notice the climb rate is slower than what we normally use to be. But it was climb at a healthy rate, a few minute later it reach the designated altitude and start the journey.  We fly a total range of 17 KM, As you can see from the video, some parts of it is above cloud level which make a very scenic view.

The APM is totally reliable throughout the whole test flight in high altitude condition. It hold altitude and flight path nicely. We also experience strong thermal where our plane has been circle for a few minutes with zero throttle without losing altitude.

With the low cost drone system, we hope they can monitor the situation more effectively. The photo and video taken by drone will serve a good visual impact to create public awareness and ultimately our environment can be protected for us and many more generation to come.

Every Friday afternoon we have an open house/fly-in at 3D Robotics Berkeley, and this Friday we were honored to be joined by famed Java creator James Gosling, who is now with Liquid Robotics. Here he is with his colleague John Weeks, and Kaden Buckley, the 13-year-old son of Jonathan Buckley (also of Liquid), who shot these pictures.

Each Friday (weather permitting), we try to demo something that's never been done before, and preview new technologies before they're announced. It's open to all, so if you want the inside track on what's coming next from 3DR, please join us for one of these. We meet at the 3DR offices (1608 4th Street, 4th Floor, Berkeley, CA) at 1:30pm. 

Not only can you meet the 3DR team, but there are also always interesting people from the community there, too. For example, this week we had the Pebble smartwatch (hmm, I wonder what that's about?) and the Airdog teams (also hmm!): 

This week my own demo was mapping the Berkeley Marina at 65 miles per hour. Basically just an over-amped Skyfun with a GoPro pointing down and a Pixhawk doing the mapping mission, but it did the job in about 3 minutes!

Autonomous copters, planes, rovers all running missions simultaneously, sometimes working together. It's great fun, and a perfect way to spend a Friday afternoon. 

     If you have experience making maps from aerial photographs, you know it takes effort. 

When I stumbled upon another UAV-related kickstarter, Mapping with Drones, I backed them without giving it another thought. But it wasn’t because I thought they could make mapping easy. You see, I have a problem. I admit it. I’m an addict. Not just with flying robots, but also with kickstarter.  

     With sixty-eight projects backed, I didn’t even watch the video. A quick glance over the text and photos, plus my own experience with tools like PTGui Pro, PhotoScan, AutoPanoGiga, and DroneMapper told me everything I needed to know, that it’s worth risking pizza money for the promise of easier-to-generate aerial maps. Even if that same experience gave me serious doubts about the “ease” with which less-than-ideal photos could be corrected, stitched, and referenced. The guys at Drones Made Easy seem to understand the issues, and aside from attempting to introduce a niche tool to the wider non-UAV public, they seem to focus well on what they are offering: an easy-to-use cloud-based service to generate corrected, stitched, aerial photography and geo-referenced maps. 

     I’ve backed many other UAV-related kickstarters, some of which I might never use with any frequency, including HEXO+ and AirDog. After all, I have purpose-built UAVs, and I’m not into extreme sports. Leading the list as my most wiz-bang, anticipated kickstarter gadget so far is the Glyph. I suspect I will not actually use the Vaavud wind meter, but I tell myself that it will help in my pre-flight checks. I backed Easy Drone, no relation as far as I can tell, to Drones Made Easy, the San Diego team behind Mapping with Drones. Most of my flights involve aerial photography, and they start by risking my gear for a few hundred photos. Back from the field, the arduous phase begins: post-processing the data into something useful. I have a shelf littered with cool kickstarter projects, electronics, gadgets, post cards, tools. But of the near seventy projects I’ve backed so far,  Mapping with Drones is leading contender for “Most Useful”, “Biggest Timesaver” and “Best Value.” But now I’m getting ahead of myself.

     Post-processing. Ground control points, custom perl-scripts to parse out location information from the logs, shifting the time stamp, deleting blurred photos, and some manual processing when it all goes askew. I’ve used other online aerial map making services, I’ve been lost at the keyboard for hours initiating semi-automated workflows, waiting for my modest CPU/GPU to spit out another disappointing map, before I begin again, using smaller groups of images. I’m used to tedious requirements like uploading supporting flight data and needing to using GPS-enabled cameras, so I was skeptical of just how easy these guys could make this service. Still, for only thirty clams, I figured it was worth giving them a helping hand.

     That is, until their CTO Tudor Thomas sent me a friendly “thank you” message, and asked some questions about my early interest in the kickstarter. He seemed pretty confident that his team could make mapping easy. And that bothered me. So I let him have it.

     By “it”, I mean I turned over 850,000 square feet of photos, 80,000 square meters, 20 acres of images. It's far from the largest photo survey I have, but at about 800MB, it fits nicely on a typical dropbox account. It is, however, a very difficult dataset. AutoPanoGiga couldn’t process it. PTGui botched it over and over. PhotoScan and PTGui each required more than six hours of assigning ground control points, loading in photos in small batches, and re-starting the workflow multiple times. Now, don’t get me wrong, these are great tools, the fault is my own. This dataset is challenging. 

Moreover, I’m not processing it on a fifteen thousand dollar workstation, with fancy graphics chips, twelve multicore processors and massive memory.
My lowly workstation is the same computer I lug to the field, with just 16GB RAM, and a few multicore i7 chips. As for the dataset, some sections have less than 50% overlap. The camera was not stabilized, flown in 30 kt/hr gusts, and the survey was long and narrow. 

The lighting conditions were not ideal for the 1/2000 second shutter speed, so about one in five photos is so blurry as to choke up most stitching software.

It’s exactly the sort of data one expects when nothing goes right, but nothing goes horribly wrong… what most of us would call a good day. Tudor, unaware, accepted my challenge, and fed the 177 randomly-named photos, without GPS data, without flight logs, into his still-alpha version server farm. Fully automated workflow? I didn’t think they had a chance. 

     They nailed it.

     Just few hours later, an e-mail was waiting for me in my inbox, with a URL for my finished map. Operated just like maps.google.com or maps.bing.com with grab-to-move, scroll-to-zoom, and a small set of un-obstructive manual zoom controls, my aerial map, far more detailed than anything I was able to export from PTGui (with only 16GB RAM and ordinary graphics processors) is easy to navigate at any zoom level.

With this same dataset, it took me over six hours of manual processing with other software. Each time, in the offline software, the long narrow runs would go slightly off angle, and botch the automated workflows. Tiles from different parts of the survey area would become adjacent, and reality, as I knew it to be on the ground, was re-written into some strange new spider universe. So it was something of a shock to take in the correct shape, zoomed out, realizing that Tudor and his team had no first-hand experience with the land, no plan for how the photos were taken, no mission data, and no idea from whence these photos originated.

     Color me impressed. 

     For a limited time (about 20 days more) they are offering “points” towards map generation at their lowest rates. In fact, if you read the interview carefully, you’ll discover they are even offering additional discounts for DIYDrones backers. Even before I learned that, I was impressed enough that I wanted to share my delight with the output but I wanted more information to share. The proof I had already seen, but that proof lead me to wonder more about the people behind this time saver, this unexpectedly easy map generating experience. I had the opportunity to discuss, via e-mail, Mapping with Drones with San Diego, CA based Tudor Thomas, the CTO of Drones Made Easy.

Arcaven [my alter ego] -  Can you tell me more about your project and about the team?

Tudor: A lot of it can be found at the following links ­

Drones Made Easy Blog   About Drones Made Easy  510 Labs Team Experience

We have software engineers, web applications engineers, electrical engineers, a mechanical engineer and a sales and marketing guy. Between consulting jobs as 510labs, we started work on what would become Maps Made Easy a few months ago. When the need arose to start collecting our own data, we purchased a DJI Phantom 2 with Zenmuse H3­3D gimbal and GoPro Hero 3+ Silver. It certainly was an adjustment from the $500K­-$5 million systems we were used to working with, but for the results we were getting we felt the trade­off was more than worth it. Not to mention the fact that we didn’t need to deal with procuring aircraft time. We knew this was the future of commercial mapping. One day after this realization we secured a DJI dealership and formed relationships with a number of accessory manufacturers. Drones Made Easy was born.

As we grew nearer to being able to release Maps Made Easy, we knew there would be a lot of costs associated with doing it right. Security audits, expanding our computing cluster, rack space, database optimization help and further development were all going to cost money. Most of us had always wanted to do a Kickstarter so we figured we would give it a try to get the word out and raise some of the needed funds required to proceed in the form of pre­paid mapping. Support has been great so far, but the more support we get the sooner additional features will be added.

Arcaven: Can you share more about the features this service will offer? How will the data be made available for export?

Tudor: Initially, we will only be offering output as hosted map tiles (similar to Google Maps) and providing code snippets and iFrame embed codes to allow users to share their output. Through iFrame use, commercial users will be able to share created maps in forums, blogs and on their own sites without restriction. Clever people will be able to turn these tiled maps into other formats. Soon (in the next 2 months) we will be expanding the output types to include GeoTiff/Tiff, OBJ/MTL, Google KMZ (georeferenced only) and 16­bit DEM. Writing conversion tools is a pain and really time consuming so we are trying to provide one type from each category of output. Users can convert it to other formats from there.

Arcaven: Will there be methods to georeference the data?

Tudor: For sure. We will provide a simple web­based interface for associating points in aerial images with a point on a known basemap (Google Maps or Bing) or a method to manually enter more accurate means of ground control point collection. These GCPs are entered at the time of image upload and produce fully georeferenced output. This process keeps users from having to sync GPS files with their images or even dealing with the GPS output track at all. We don’t require GCPs to be entered at all. The output will be almost identical except for the fact that it won’t be georeferenced and will likely have a random rotation. I suspect non­georeferenced stitch jobs will be more than good enough for most people. We plan on adding a simplified geo­alignment workflow where the user will be able to set the rotation and scale of produced stitch so it can be viewed North Up and be used for making measurements.

It was about this time in my discussion with Tudor that he let me in on a secret. Understand, I’ve spend far more money on offline mapping software than I would care to admit to anyone except my credit card company, and that is without the cost of hours of fighting with the software. The map generated by his fully-automated workflow? He estimates it would cost me less than his lowest paid subscription service, with processing budget left over. Less than $9.99. 

Arcaven: Do you have a message for the average drone operator who is concerned about the privacy of their mapping data?

Tudor: Sharing and ease of access to our processed data is our primary concern. We provide users with controls for including their maps in our public gallery and allowing public sharing by means of embedding. Our map tiles are redundantly stored using industry standard cloud storage solutions. All tiles paths are deeply obfuscated behind 512 bits of UUID combinations that make it all but impossible to access the images without prior knowledge of where the image resides. If a user doesn’t want to share their data, the best way for them to access it is by accessing it while logged into our site. The cloud storage for map tiles is publicly accessible, but like every image accessed by social media, it is heavily obfuscated. If a user is extremely concerned about data privacy, I would propose that they download the output data as soon as possible and delete the map. We can work with extreme sensitivities on a case­-by­-case basis.

Arcaven: Do you foresee loosing potential customers due to concerns that the FAA or other government agencies might come looking for rule­-breakers at your site?

Tudor: Maybe. I must say this: we do not condone breaking the rules. Maps Made Easy will work with images taken from drones and other RC aircraft as well as images captured using full­-sized airplanes or helicopters. It is very hard to tell the difference between the two once the imagery is processed. That being said, we don’t control what data is posted to our site for private use. As long as maps are not included in our gallery or shared publicly, access to the data is nearly impossible. The map creator’s username is not shared in our gallery. Also, if a map is not geo-referenced (I realize it is not a real map without a location and scale), there is no way to tell where the images were taken from unless someone recognizes it.

We really doubt the FAA is going to be granted the authority to regulate airspace all the way down to the ground on private property. This is an air rights issue and they go back to the day flight was first conceived. Private property owners will always be able to operate within a certain distance above ground on their private property for legitimate private use. Mapping activities will all be able to be conducted within whatever this ceiling is eventually defined as.

Arcaven: What sorts of features and map editing tools (orientation, 3D rendering, ..., etc) do you foresee in the service, initially and over time?

Tudor: Some of these were answered above, but it is a good list to have them all in one place.

Arcaven: What message do you have for potential backers, and for DIYDrones members?

Tudor: We would love to help people realize what kind of new applications are presented by being able to control when aerial imagery is taken instead of waiting for a Google Maps flyover update. Legitimate use of drones will be a rapidly growing segment of the economy over the next 10 years and DIYDrones users are already at the forefront of it.

In addition to processing that rivals the best available: ease of access, ease of sharing, control of data accessibility, compatibility with GIS systems and management of data over time are the key aspects to what we are trying to provide.

We are doing everything we can to help legitimize the use of drones. Yes, they are fun to play with but they will open up many opportunities for people as useful business tools. Our stretch goal on the Kickstarter campaign is to create a Mapping Marketplace that will pair drone users who like to create maps with property owners who need mapping services. We need a lot of help to reach that goal...

We would like to offer a special incentive to DIYDrones users that back our Kickstarter. For backers that identify themselves as DIYDrones community members after the campaign ends, we will add an additional 25% to whatever their backer reward point total would be.

What makes your service special, and sets it apart from similar services and software?

Tudor: Accessibility and ease. Aerial data is huge and notoriously hard to share. We have seen people take 10s of TB of images and never process any of it because it was disorganized and too unwieldy. We get a lot of requests to offer our software for offline use, but that goes against our goal which is to make stitched aerial imagery easier to share and manage. This is an internet driven world and we are taking aerial mapping off the client machine and putting it in the cloud.

Full Disclosure: I backed the project. That, and this article, is my only association with these guys. No kickbacks. Except they did stitch a map that I'd already spent more than 20 hours stitching with other software. My purpose in sharing is because I was really impressed with their demonstrated ability to save me time in the future.  Back them, and I think they will impress you, too. I may have a problem with my addiction to Kickstarter, but I'm not regretting my decision to back this project.

Image from www.downtownmiaminews.com

Hey Folks,

A little while back we at Falcon Unmanned developed a tool that we like for doing data analysis on a flight.  What it does is takes the data from a flight log and generates a lot of different charts for some important parameters.  In the spirit of opensource and sharing and world peace and kittens we figured it might help a few of you out there with your own data analysis and troubleshooting.  So below you will find the link to the macro enable spreadsheets.  In the spread sheet you will find an instructions tab which goes through the steps to run a flight log.  

We are providing two different versions.  One we use for our Fixed Wing Falcon and one we use for our Multi Copter Falcon Hover.  Falcon flies for a long time so the data logs generated and file sizes can sometimes exceed Excel's capabilities so the Fixed Wing Arduanalysis only plots the data from the time you go above 10m to the time you go below 10m as well as a 1000 data points before and after to hopefully capture the take off and landing.  The Multicopter Arduanalysis will plot the entire flight log.  If you have more than one takeoff and landing in a fixed wing flight or they images don't capture your complete takeoff/landing then use the multicopter arduanalysis or change the code to suit your needs.

The spreadsheets are offered up as-is and with no warranty as I tend to drink alot of craft beer while coding.  I have left the macro unlocked so you review and modify the macro code as you wish.

Import things to note:

RTFM (i.e. instructions tab)

Excel is required so you might want to have that

These are macro enabled excel spreadsheets so your virus software or firewall may not like them

Give the macro time to run

Fixed Wing Arduanalysis

Multicopter Arduanalysis

Drone on,

Chris Miser, Owner Dude Man

Falcon Unmanned

www.falconunmanned.com

Recently I started to get interested in the Arduino open source micro-controller project. I bought an amazing little sensor board from ebay called the GY-80 which has 10DOF (degrees of freedom) and can be bought for £10.

The GY-80 IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) has 10 (plus temperature) sensors:

• 3 axes accelerometer  ADXL345
• 3 axes gyrometer L3G4200D
• 3 axes magnetometer HMC5883L
• barometer BMP085
• temperature BMP085

My vision at the time was to build an inertial flight control system using my own software running on an Arduino Nano and the GY-80 IMU

I found that the Arduino IDE programming environment didn't give me enough flexibility so I decided to use Eclipse which is a very versatile open source IDE which supports C/C++.

I wrote C++ code for the Arduino and GY-80 which was able to calculate the attitude of the GY-80 board and I was preparing to start on the PID (Proportional Integral Derivative) part which would send the motor control signals based on manual directions and the measured attitude.

At this point I bought an X525 kit from Ebay for £80 which came with its KK2.5 flight controller and all the bits apart from battery and radio control gear.

I bought a FlySky TH-9X 2.4GHz 9 channel digital radio transmitter and receiver for £63. This transmitter (also branded by Turnigy) has been unceremoniously hacked and there are many mods out there 

e.g.

Lipo battery for powering transmitter

Open source firmware to reflash

Back light for the LCD screen

I built the X525 quad with KK2.5 flight controller but I had many problems calibrating the machine. The cheap kit from ebay was an older version of the KK board. After a lot of trial and error I found the source code (actually Atmel Assembler) for the revision of the board I have and it was possible to figure it all out.

However, at the same time I was looking at Arduino based projects for drones and flight controllers.

FreeIMU

Ardupilot

FreeIMU is a very nice project, conceived by Fabio Varesano, sadly he passed away in Jan 2013, a great loss to open source robotics.

I settled on the Ardupilot. I was looking at the older versions, APM1 and previous, because it is based on the Arduino Mega board and is standard Arduino.

In the end I bought the Ardupilot APM2 board for £60. This controller board is based on the Atmel mega 2560 but is a modification to the standard Arduino mega.

The trouble with buying a cheap clone board from China on eBay is that you may have problems which can be extremely difficult to resolve. Such was the case here. The APM2 controller is designed to be powered with 5 volts derived from a variety of possible sources:

• Speed Controller Battery Elimination Circuit (ESC BEC). The ESC's can provide 5V to power the APM2 and the radio receiver. I fed a jumper cable from one of the APM2 +5V Output side pins to the +5V Channel 8 pin on the Input side of the APM2 
• USB port. This is the simplest way to power the board when you are using the mission control software from a PC.
• Power Module (PM) board. (Power-Module.zip for eagle layouts). This is an external board designed by 3D Robotics and is touted as the best solution for flying the drone.

The problem is that when you go online to buy a clone of the PM board you find you are in a world of confusion. The board itself should have three functions:

1) Connect the Lipo battery to the power distribution harness

2) Power and Current sensing for the main power rails from the Lipo battery

3) Stabilised power supply for the APM2 logic circuits.

I realised that the clone boards come in two types.

The cheaper types do not have function 3).

The "full" versions have a 5V3 regulator board attached which is used to supply 5V3 to the APM2 across a protection Zener which drops 0.3V. The regulated 5V3 is provided on the multi pin connector along with the sensing. 

The forums are full of talk of missing components and I was distracted by this at first. I had the APM2 powered up using the ESC BEC method but I ordered a "full" PM board because it should supply clean regulated power. The first thing I noticed when it arrived was a missing capacitor but the specified voltage regulator on the PM is the PTH08080WAH and it doesn't absolutely require this capacitor at the 5V3 volts it is working at.

I connected the new PM to the quad after disconnecting the ESC BEC jumper and I removed the tiny jumper from the APM2 to isolate the circuit (in fact my cheap APM2 clone didn't have any jumper pins soldered in at all!) . Nothing happened so I measured the output of the PM regulator and it is exactly 5V not the 5.3V I was expecting. I could connect another 489 Ohm resistor in parallel with the voltage selection resistor which would provide 205 Ohms for 5V3 not the 353 Ohms for 5V0 that it is now on the PM board (Ohms Law for parallel resistors), but I went back to the ESC BEC to power the APM2 for now.

The quad is just past first flight. A dry connection on one of the XT60 connectors cause it to drop from the sky after a few seconds of full current load but otherwise it is quite stable in Loiter Mode

The 2200mAH 3S Lipo battery was puffed up a bit due to me overcharging it previously using the iMax B6AC charger.

This was a lesson regarding Lipo safety I shall never forget.

I put it on charge again and forgot about it. The battery exploded with 3 load cracks, one per cell, and nearly set fire to my house. The battery was ablaze with a fierce heat and I had no fire protection equipment of any sort. I used a kitchen spatula to hook the burning block of lithium into a saucepan and threw it outside along with the burning cables and cardboard it had already ignited. Lost in the fire due to burnt cables was a soldering iron, the iMax charger, and my multimeter has a melted case. The kitchen work surface is badly damaged. I had become complacent, ignoring all I had read about Lipo safety. From now on all my Lipo batteries are stored in a heavy pan on sand. I will never leave them on charge unattended, or with other flammable materials close by. In fact I am going to buy a fire proof bag for when I have to transport them. As soon as a Lipo looks a bit puffy its time to be extra cautious.

Hey guys,

a long time passed since the last update from OpenFPV.

Thank's to the community for the great feedback and special thanks to all people around the world who wrote me feedback mails, joined the project or donated money. I really appreciate your interest about the project.

It was very silent the last month about the project, the reason is very simple:

I do not want to ship crappy unusable software.

My vision for OpenFPV:

OpenFPV should be a simple intuitive application for all desktop platforms. Easily extendable, stable, well designed. And easily extendable was the biggest challenge. Do you want beat around with C++? Do you want build your GUI with Qt?

Imagine you can create a dedicated data channel on TX side with python and receive the data on RX side with simple JavaScript. Layout your UI with HTML5 Elements. If you want to go deeper, why not edit the GStreamer pipe by your own. Without recompiling the whole application. Create your telemetry module in no time.

The trouble:

It was insanely difficult to get the video played back inside the webkit browser engine without adding delay to it. It is not possible to do it with HTML Video, Flash, WebRTC. The biggest challenges are buffer settings. Event Flash cannot display the video fast enough (and this is the most stable technology for live streams inside a browser) for serious FPV flying. My OpenFPV workspace directory is full with prototypes, ideas, and more prototypes. After month of fighting with myself and my vision I came to a deadly simple idea. Convert the H264 stream to a format like MPEG-1 and decode it with JS.

Maybe you think: "What the ... ?"

Don't worry, that was my first though too. I started to write a MPEG-1 decoder with JS until I stumbled upon a unpopular project on github which is doing exactly this job. After integrating all the GStreamer pipelines, transcoding, sockets and web sockets and this library, I displayed the fist output inside the browser. Without high CPU load and a good quality. And the best thing: Without a noteworthy additional lag. Sometimes the simple Ideas are more difficult then the complex ones.

Demo:

I created from this Iron Bird the first prototype. And I decided to give you guys a little update about the project. I am excited about your thoughts and ideas.

- Tilman

With six days still to go, Airdog has now passed $1 million on Kickstarter. So exciting to see if they'll end up ahead or behind Hexo+'s $1.3 million. 

Both are based on Pixhawk and we're working with both teams, so I've backed and am rooting for them both. Go teams!

Hey everyone,

 I wanted to post an update on the work I have been doing on the techwing design.

The new design is scaled up some to a 40 inch WS. It also includes real Grantz type winglets, a longer tip cord and fixed LE slots.

Flat plate:

 With winglets:

By reducing the vortex, you can expect less drag, greater lift, and better stall characteristics.

The next thing I did was add fixed LE slots to the outboard panel. LE slots allow the wing to fly at much higher angle of attack .

This is the techwing at a 13 degree AoA. Dark blue is the most negative pressures.

Here you can see the slotted airfoil at a 13 deg AoA. It achieves a 1.19 CL  normally this airfoil would have a Cl max of ~0.75.

The slots also help to increase aileron effectiveness. I just finished the first mold for the prototype. this is the bottom of the fuselage.

We at the Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) mission are delighted to welcome on board Linus Penzlien, well known to DIY Droners*, and who'll be lending a hand crafting custom mission parameters for our Vulture 2 spaceplane's Pixhawk autopilot.

Thanks to Andrew Tridgell for recommending Linus for the job. The Hamburg native will be flying out to Spain next month to get hands-on with the Vulture, and the results will no doubt be of interest to APM:Plane aficionados. It's going to be a team effort, and we'll keep you posted on just what coding magic is worked on our ballocket flight's autopilot. There's more on Linus right here.

*Is that the official term?

The requirements for the operation of unmanned aircrafts for commercial and semi-professional purposes have changed fundamentally in the past years in Europe and worldwide.
The regulations will get even more strictly in the future.
Depending on the application, the weight, the purpose, the situation, the flight area, spectators and some more reasons, SAFETY is becoming increasingly important.
Even if one repeatedly hears times here and there by the aviation authorities that they grant special rights for certain user groups (e.g. film industry, logistic companies…), so it is at the end the insurance, which restricts a project or even makes it impossible.

Please check also a statement from Poms & Associates:

Single point of failure and redundancy became one of the leading keywords for permissions and certifications from authorities and insurances.
Among other parts inside a system, redundancy of the autopilot system is meanwhile mandatory to follow the rules (here in Austria…other States will follow), especially for multicopters. They are very instable in their flight characteristics when it comes to malfunction of the stabilization system.

We therefore developed a redundancy circuit board which is an intelligent and automatic monitoring and controlling bridge between two independent running autopilot systems, a mutual protection in case of malfunction in an autopilot system.
Even if both autopilots fail (power supply, freezing controller…), the forwarding of the control signals for a manual flight of the aircraft or helicopter (not recommended for multicopters) is granted.

This system also offers the possibility to switch manually between two different autopilot systems to test different software and system setups. The data of each autopilot system can be monitored and changed during the flight separately Another benefit of the AP-Manager (this is the name of the upcoming product) is that for the most autopilots only one telemetry module is needed to monitor data of both autopilot systems (except DJI).

Hence the AP-Manager© is the perfect companion to test the most recent updates or new parameter upgrades for your autopilot systems.

Currently, these autopilot systems have been tested successfully:
•    Ardupilots 2.5/ 2.6
•    PX4 Pixhawk
•    DJI NAZA V2
•    MikroKopter Flight Ctrl ME 2.1

Basically there is no reason that other autopilot systems from other manufacturers won’t work. The board has been designed that all ports are compatible with the common used autopilot systems.

My name is Robert Hoermann and I am the managing director of GIZMOtec Ltd. in Austria.
We will start our campaign within the next 10 days to fund the AP-Manager to share this idea and benefits to the large community of unmanned systems and RC models.
We would like to invite you to visit our new website on www.GIZMOtec.eu (sorry, some construction is still in progress) to enter for a newsletter to be one of the first parties to get informed, when the Indiegogo campaign will start.

We also implemented some first FAQ's and a discussion forum.

When starting the Indiegogo campaign we will also provide a “limited early bird” offer.

Thank you for joining us.

With very best regards,

Robert

Blair Hanley Frank is GeekWire's Bay Area Correspondent. He has also worked for Macworld, PCWorld and TechHive. He can be found on Twitter @belril and can be reached by email atblair@geekwire.com.

Well this is a delightful bit of irony. 

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) decided to capture the excitement of his June 21 wedding day on video using a drone, even though the commercial use of remotely controlled vehicles is still restricted by the FAA, which Maloney oversees on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Aviation Subcommittee.

Maybe this will help our cause.  A congressman with authority over the FAA now has first hand experience with the FAA's incompetent and delayed handling of this issue.  This 2lb toy with a camera could have taken down a loaded 747 hovering there 30ft above ground next to the giant brick church.  Clearly this is a danger to the NAS, much like surveying corn husks.

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Rep-Sean-Patrick-Maloney-Rockland-Drone-Video-Wedding-FAA-267451671.html

When Iris met Hubsan, i didn't know such a miracle could happen!

He arrived yesterday and is still very underweight... But i must admit, he is very cute and flies like an hummingbird. I could not resist to share my happiness with the community. 

So I had some time to look into the 3D reconstruction and visualization some more and managed to make significant improvements to the workflow. In the first results I didn't clean up points and applied the texture to the entire model in one go, straight from generation -> blender. This makes the UV atlas ( a parametrized texture, where it decides which surface gets what ) really fragmented and you end up with a very small number of useful pixels in the texture, losing about 50% of useful space. Increasing this to 2 textures doesn't really help that much.

So today I took a different approach: spend one day cleaning up the model, splitting up the data and iterate towards incrementally better results. My workflow now uses the following:

1. Generate the dense point cloud. I used "medium"  settings, as high would get me 54M points and I don't have that much memory to post-process those results. I work with around 16M points.
2. Delete stray points. More time spent here improves mesh results because you generate fewer surfaces that are parametrized in the UV atlas. So try to get rid of all. Make sure to delete points under and above the mesh. Try to delete points inside buildings too (which are not visible and generated in an attempt to reconstruct the roof).
3. Remove trees and vegetation. If you want trees, you should recreate them using a 3D package. They never look very good from survey results. This does create some gaping holes in the ground, because the trees consumed ground detail from the photos.
4. ( close gaps where trees used to be? ).
5. Classify the data points to separate the meshes you're going to create. Separating the meshes really helps to reduce the wasted space in the UV atlas (the texture). Ideally, you want to get rid of all vertical surfaces (surfaces > 45 deg) .  Classification is done by selecting 'building' or 'ground' for each data point (unfortunately yes, each one).
6. Select all data points and classify them as ground.
7. Use the lasso tool to select an area around a building you want to classify and also select some points of the ground area around it. Classify them as building.
8. From a slightly oblique view, select the points near the building where you want the building edge and move that selection outwards. Reclassify the selected ground points as ground. From 2-3 different views around the building, you now have a clear separation of 'building' and ground.
9. Do this for all buildings.
10. Try to remove other vertical surfaces like cars and fences.
11. Build your mesh using only points classified as ground.
12. Build the texture for the mesh. For the ground, the "ortho" projection works well at 8192 if you don't have many vertical surfaces.
13. Export the ground model as obj or whatever you prefer.
14. Build your mesh using only points classified as buildings. This replaces your mesh, but not your dense point cloud.
15. Build the texture for this mesh too, but use "generic" projection instead and 8192.
16. Export the "buildings" model as obj or whatever you prefer.
17. Import buildings and ground into blender or some other 3D tool. I use 'cycles' in blender and need to "use nodes" in the material settings and select the texture.
18. I select my "all buildings"  object and separate each building to make it a separate object instead. This allows me to hide stuff I"m not working on and makes it easier to edit results from different viewpoints. Then I activate the building I work on, the ground and usually start with a new cube that I try to fit into the building. From there I split the cube into fragments to extrude and push back surfaces and iteratively work to add more detail to the mesh, trying to make it as much as possible like the original. Obviously, the better data you have of the original, the better this works out. In a sense, the photoscan generated mesh is a 'proxy' for me to use as a source.
19. I then delete the generated object and keep the clean building. At this time you have as much detail as you can reasonably could get so the original building is never going to be needed again.
20. I then export each separate object, one-by-one from blender and import it back into photoscan. 
21. It appears as a single mesh and I regenerate the texture once again for that building with the new geometry. This time I select a small texture size like 256/512/1024. That's fine for aerial visualizations, but it depends on the size of the building.
22. When the texture is rebuilt, I export the single building from photoscan again and reimport it into blender, substituting it for the one I had that had no textures. It now has a cool new texture with the original dirt and grime and stuff.
23. When all are done one-by-one, the scene looks amazing especially from a bit of a distance. The sharp corners look much better as well as the removal of the bubbly surfaces. It is possible though that the surface doesn't exactly fit the wall, so it may loop over to the roof or vice-versa. That's because it's always a bit of guesswork with geometry.

Further improvements can be made from there. You could decide to tweak the geometry a bit more.

It's possibly a good idea to classify the ground close to buildings not as ground but as something different. I found that if you have no ground points for the building, it sort of seems to wave upwards and you don't have a proper measure for the ground distance. You can see this happening in the video when it flies to the big building and you look at the little shed roofs near the bottom and the 2 buildings on the right. So it's a good idea to leave some ground points there. You'll want to create the mesh then with 2 groups so you get the ground points in each mesh.

Where can you take this?  Well, the guys here used a helicopter and photoscan to generate a 3D model of a spot in South Africa called Sandton City. They used that model similar to how I worked; as proxies to make their own 3D models, but they modeled the buildings the way they wanted to get better control over how it can be disassembled. It also reduces the poly count. The exact spot, size and hull are pretty well defined by photogrammetry, so you can get an artist to work out the interior bits. You can see how this works in the "making of" video.  They only took 9 weeks!

All these efforts simply dwarf by the efforts from AEROmetrex of course.