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Description of the problem to solve:

When a high enough current switching (transition to/from an on/off state) occurs in an electrical circuit, an electrical arc will form between the two switching contact surfaces, in order to oppose (resist to) this circuit change in current. 

The more inductance and/or capacitance in the circuit, the bigger the electric spark will be. Capacitors can be viewed as current storage devices (with a full or empty status, like water reservoirs) : when connecting a battery on an emtpy capacitor (e.g. an ESC), the maximum amperage the battery can deliver will flow into the circuit in a very short time to fill the capacitors (until the capacitors are full), producing a spark in the meantime.

This phenomenon is thus more severe when there is more total capacitance in the circuit. This is an issue with multicopters that have lots of capacitors in their power circuit : minimum 4 ESCs (for quads) and up to 8 ESCs (for octocopters), each ESC having multiple big capacitors.

The phenomenon is also more severe when the battery has a higher voltage (4S-> 5S-> 6S), simply because a higher voltage makes it easier to ionise a thin layer of air between the two switching contacts, as required to produce a spark.

Why should we avoid sparks ? to avoid damage to UAV's battery connectors (gold plated contact areas are damaged by repeated sparks, the plastic of the connectors will be burned, etc). Some sensitive electrical circuits do not like short bursts of high currents. For example, from experience, an attopilot (voltage and current sensor) circuit has been damaged by repeated sparks using a 6S battery....

Solution to the problem:

The solution is theoritically simple : capacitors have to be charged slowly (e.g. with a small current) before connecting the full amperage power of a battery to the ESCs circuits.

Many previous blog posts on diydrones & rcgroups have mentioned various solutions. The one described below synthesizes how to use an interesting circuit : a BTS555 integrated circuit,

As described in its datasheet, its applications are:

The two last bullet points, in particular, are the ones that interest us the most.

This BTS555 IC summary is given in the following datasheet extract:

We see from this datasheet table that a BTS555 will support a current load of 165 amps ! This is more than enough for a large multicopter. It operates up to 34V which is fine for up to 8S batteries.

From the datasheet we get the following pinout description:

In our application, only Pins 1, 2 and 5 will be used.

Pin 3 will not be used as it is replaced by the IC tab (for high current uses).

Pin 4 will not be used as we do not need to measure the current in our application (rather, a 3DR power module or an Attopilot would be used for that purpose)

How does this work ?

This BTS555 IC is connected between the battery leads and the power distribution board's leads. A small mechanical switch (for example a sliding switch. This switch interrupts a very small current, so no spark issue there) must be used to activate ON or OFF this circuit.

Here is the step by step process to power your multicopter using this circuit (assuming everything has been wired up as described below):

-Connect the BTS555 circuit to the power input leads of your power distibution board

-Ensure the activation switch is on its OFF position

-Connect the battery leads to the BTS555 circuit

-Activate the BTS555 circuit by flipping its switch to the ON position. Your mutlicopter receives now full power from the battery and the spark is avoided.

-If you use a double battery power feed on your drone, follow this same procedure when connecting a first battery. Then connect simply the second battery (no spark will be produced because all capacitors were loaded when the first battery was connected). You can then, optionally, remove the BTS555 circuit from the drone (to remove weight and to not depend on its reliability during flight. Simpler is better and more reliable)

How to wire everything up ?

As reliability is critical in flying multicopters, therefore to not depend on only one BTS555 circuit, the wiring scheme below uses two parallel BTS555 ICs...

The input and outputs of the overall circuit are XT90 connectors (safer than XT60 connectors for bigger multicopters). The elements (ICs, connectors) are soldered on a piece of PCB protoboard. XT90 connectors are soldered directly on each side of this PCB (more compact, no extra wires).

The wiring scheme is the following (for clarity, one side of the protoboard is used as a shared ground plane; the other side is the positive side divided in two zones: the top side where the IC tabs are soldered together and to the battery +Vin. Then the bottom side where pins 1,2 and 5 are soledred together and to the positive PDB output connector, but not to the TAB zone !) :

Concrete realisation :

This circuit has been tested succesfully on octocopters (8 ESCs) , 6S batteries with APM, Pixhawk, Attopilot module.

Cheers,

Hugues

Last week my colleague Mitch Solomon and I were privileged to be in the company of more than one thousand farmers in rural Decatur, IL, for the two-day Precision Aerial Agriculture Show 2014 (PAAS 2014).  Mitch covers five key takeaways from the show in his post about the event – including the most salient one: There is no killer drone app for farmers – rather, drones are a tool with many apps and high ROI.  In this post, I’ll give an accounting and analysis of the players in attendance that are supporting the market for drones in agriculture. Some were present, others were mentioned but weren’t present, and still others were surprisingly absent on all counts.

Bottom line

Regardless of which vendors attended or exhibited, here’s what you need to know with regard to the drones vendors serving or intending to serve the agriculture market:

1. Most of the companies that serve this market are small businesses. It is clear they are working hard to learn firsthand what farmers want from small drones and in doing so are establishing networks of distributors and service providers that will lock other players out of the market.
2. Manufacturers of small drones for precision agriculture are consolidating around DJI and 3DRobotics for their flight control and mission planning software – mainly because of functional maturity and low-cost.
3. The large aerospace companies and Department of Defense (DoD) contract vendors do not have a presence in this market. Even though some have participated in agricultural academic studies, as a whole their products are unknown in the farming community. These vendors simply have not established the necessary relationships with growers, dealers, coops, agronomists, and local service providers.  As a result, it’s probably too late for them to capture any significant U.S. agriculture market share.

Present and Accounted For

AgEagle – AgEagle had the enviable booth position just inside the show floor, which made it hard to ignore. Its purpose-built Ritewing Zephyr II fixed-wing flyer with uTHERE flight controller and Canon S100 camera goes for about US $12,500.  The system comes with a catapult to get it in the air fast, where it will fly at 40 mph and cover approximately 600 acres in 30 minutes. A cloud-based aerial agronomic imagery solution is offered in partnership with MyAgCentral, a division of DN2K. This solution has a fully integrated workflow function that streamlines the process of flying fields and capturing, storing, processing, viewing, and sharing aerial images. For instance, ‘shape files’ can be imported into SMSTM Software for use with variable rate applicators. Information on that partnership can be found here.

Read more here: http://droneanalyst.com/2014/07/16/drone-tech-winners-and-losers-at-the-precision-aerial-ag-conference-2014/

Cross-posted from iRevolution.net.

"What if, to solve our problems, we simply need to rise above them?"

CartONG and France's OpenStreetMap (OSM) community recently teamed up to support OSM Haiti's disaster risk reduction efforts by deploying a small UAV, "which proved very useful for participatory mapping." This video documentary provides an excellent summary of this humanitarian UAV mission which took place just a few weeks ago.

As I noted in this earlier blog post on grassroots UAVs, the use of UAVs at the community level can be viewed as an extension of community and participatory mapping, which is why community engagement is pivotal for humanitarian UAV deployments. In many ways, a micro-UAV can actually bring a community together; can catalyze conversations & participation, which should be taken as more than simply a positive externality. Public Participatory GIS Projects (PPGIS) have long been used as a means to catalyze community conversations and even conflict resolution and mediation. So one should not overlook the positive uses of UAVs as a way to convene a community. Indeed, as CartONG and partners rightly note in the above video documentary, "The UAV is the uniting tool that brings the community together."

This joint UAV project in Haiti has three phases: training for data collection; analysis and use of collected data; and empowering the Haitian OSM community to lead their own projects with their own partners. The first phase, which was just completed, comprised 42 individual UAV flights (using SenseFly's eBee) in multiple locations including the Port-au-Prince area, the urbanized part of Saint-Marc, Sans-Souci Palace (Unesco World Heritage Site), Dominican Republic border areas and Bord de Mer. This enabled the Haitian OSM community to test the UAV under varying conditions and across different terrains.

The UAV flight training included "aerial security" and an overview of the UAV's weaknesses. As CartONG rightly notes, the use of UAVs for data collection and the training that goes along with "strengthen Haitian OSM communities, so that they can fully take part in local development."

To this end, I'm hoping to see more women flying UAVs in the future rather than seeing them standing by as passive observers. Community engagement without women is not community engagement. Perhaps UAVs can play a role in uniting and enabling women to become more engaged and take on leadership roles within communities.

As part of their initial phase, CartONG and team also set up a mini-server to facilitate the processing of UAV imagery on site. "Considering the difficulties faced regarding aerial image processing the need for such a tool has been confirmed for all situations where accessing internet & electricity is a challenge." Moreover, the Haitian OSM community expressed a direct interest in not only piloting UAVs but also in the processing and analysis of the resulting data: "communities wish to be trained to be able to fully master the process of collection and processing of aerial image, including on software such as ArcGIS and QGIS."

I'm excited about these efforts and keen to follow the next phases of this UAV community mapping project. In the meantime, big thanks to CartONG's Martin Noblecourt for kindly sharing this important volunteer-driven project. If you want to learn more about this initiative, feel free to contact Martin via email at info@cartong.org.

See Also:

• Humanitarians in the Sky: Using UAVs for Disaster Response [link]
• Humanitarian UAV Missions in During Balkan Floods [link]

Congrats to the Hexo+ team, whose Pixhawk-powered follow-me copter just finished its Kickstarter campaign at an amazing $1.3 million!

Hot on its heels is Airdog, another Pixhawk-powered follow-me copter, which is at $930,000 with nine days still to go. 

I've backed them both!

Techpod kits are going on sale from today until july 31st They will be available for $140 to all US and Canadian customers.

All newly shipped techpod kits will be shipped with these great upgrade parts which make the tail and wing very easy to remove and transport.

.

For those of you who already own a techpod and want to purchase the upgrade kits, they are available separately here. Techpod upgrades.

The first version of the Humanitarian UAV Network's Crisis Map of UAV/aerial videos is now live on the Network's website. The crowdsourced map features dozens of aerial videos of recent disasters. Like social media, this new medium—user-generated (aerial) content—can be used by humanitarian organizations to complement their damage assessments and thus improve situational awareness.

The purpose of this Humanitarian UAV Network (UAViators) map is not only to provide humanitarian organizations and disaster-affected communities with an online repository of aerial information on disaster damage to augment their situational awareness; this crisis map also serves to raise awareness on how to safely & responsibly use small UAVs for rapid damage assessments. This explains why users who upload new content to the map must confirm that they have read the UAViator's Code of Conduct. They also have to confirm that the videos conform to the Network's mission and that they do not violate privacy or copyrights. In sum, the map seeks to crowdsource both aerial footage and critical thinking for the responsible use of UAVs in humanitarian settings.

As noted above, this is the first version of the map, which means several other features are currently in the works. These new features will be rolled out incrementally over the next weeks and months. In the meantime, feel free to suggest any features you'd like to see in the comments section below. Thank you.

See also:

• Humanitarian UAV Network: Strategy for 2014-2015 [link]
• Humanitarians in the Sky: Using UAVs for Disaster Response [link]
• Humanitarian UAV Missions in During Balkan Floods [link]
• Using UAVs for Disaster Risk Reduction in Haiti [link]
• Using MicroMappers to Make Sense of UAV/Aerial Imagery During Disasters [link]

Having started as a crazy idea for just a small side project, the optical flow sensor quickly hacked together (we conduct our research on other topics) by a group of PhDs is now adopted by more and more systems. And because its an useful tool for research (not so much a research contribution), it made even a short paper. Optical flow is a pretty old and basic technique, but quite robust if the camera runs at very high rate - and the main success factor making the AR.Drone so robust and easy to fly.

Aside from the easy integration into different systems, the main benefit of a standalone design is the extremely low latency of the velocity output. In our latest Firmware version currently in testing the camera sensor runs at 450 Hz, which makes the output despite the relatively basic algorithm extremely robust. And it means we can bump the maximum speed to ~3 m/s per meter altitude, or in other words: Allow a maximum speed of 30 m/s at 10 m altitude and still allow a smooth precision landing at 3 m/s at 1 m altitude.

Because the ground distance noise feeds into the velocity noise, the next big step will be the integration of laser based altitude estimates - and with the Lidar-Lite having a really low price tag, it will be an ideal combination. The ultrasound ranging was in fact so far the biggest limitation and with this removed, we think an optical flow sensor should become the default in addition to GPS today - its a great complimentary technology to improve robustness and accuracy.

And by becoming a default, the costs of making the module will come down to a level where its a no-brainer to get one. Besides our own system a number of autopilot systems have been successfully interfaced (AutoQuad, MikroKopter and lately ArduCopter).

This video shows a scenario called urban canyon, where the multi path reflections of the environment and the blocked sky view by buildings make GPS reception extremely challenging and much less accurate than on an open field:

And of course there are many more cool videos on Youtube - I just couldn't embed all of them here.

http://youtu.be/eAsU1ne2C9I

Hi guys,

Hexacopter (own construction) with Pixhawk, APM, in strong crosswinds.
The Copter is established as a flagpole.

Many thanks to Randy for 3.2-rc1 9

The recordings we made just before our Soccer Match Germany vs Argentina

and then won the game :)

ciao Klaus

Excuse me if I'm missing a beat, but It could be a cool hack to combine the google cardboard VR kit:

with a skyped-to-your-smartphone 3D fpv video.

This would allow a spectator to experience FPV flying in SBS 3D. 

Update:

I think that the DJI Phantom might have a heads-up on Arducopter as it's video feed is sent via 2.4ghz (wifi frequency).

It seems plausible that a specific video-over-wifi app can be made for Google Cardboard & Phantom 2.4ghz video and avoid the lag issues that would exist when using a 5.8ghz vtx & skype workaround to send video from a 'capture device & laptop' to a smartphone.

My second guess, is that DJI are already in prototyping for such a system that includes a 3d Blackbird fpv camera:

transmitting video over wifi (2.4ghz signal) to a smartphone app and using the Carboard SDK/Project Tango SDK. It's smoothly compatible when you think about it, compared to attempting to hack most people's 5.8ghz vtx modules.

How could 3DR respond?

I mean, are there any Turnigy 9x radio modules that allow you to use 5.8ghz, instead of 2.4ghz?

I am aware that there are 2.4ghz VTX & VRX modules available like this one so it seems that the issue is converting your Turnigy 9x to use 5.8ghz..Or UHF frequency like OpenLRS or EzUHF system.

At the moment, In my eyes, this is the future for immersive flight on a consumer level. For most people who have already taken up the hobby of quadcopter building, it's going to be an outlay yet again for you guys to change both your flight controller & fpv transmitters. 

The other option would be to use a dedicated goggle like the occulus rift connected to a 5.8ghz receiver, but who wants to outlay the money for a dedicated goggle when it's possible to adapt a smartphone that most people already own? It's a cost outlay dilemma it seems.

Option 1: Use a dedicated SBS 3D/Occulus Rift goggle: $350 (probably more when it's ready for release) & 3D fpv blackbird camera: $135 

Option 2: Convert your 9x to 5.8ghz (not aware this is possible) or use OpenLRS ($50)/EzUHF ($200) (, change your fpv system to 2.4ghz (Price variable) and use your smartphone & 3D FPV app.

Something to start to think about, converting to UHF radio & 2.4ghz video.

Link: http://benbojanglesosd.blogspot.co.uk/

NOTE: Parameter settings was also broken. Next release we will also have 'beta' releases so we can avoid these simple mistakes getting into stable releases, and if you are so inclined, can help us test before release.

2.0.13 improves connectivity with bluetooth devices as well. :-) Thx for all the reports so far on these issues. You can always try the daily builds if you like to experiment see http://firmware.diydrones.com/Tools/APMPlanner/daily/

NOTE: auto tlogging was broken, so we have pushed a minor update to fix the issue. There are some other small changes as well, see the release notes for more info 

Happy Independence Day for those in the US.

A new release of APM Planner 2.0.13 is available.

In this release we have

• Upload to Droneshare
  • You can now upload logs to Droneshare from the Graph View.
• Support for APM Mission Planning commands
  • All APM specific commands are supported. (excludes ROI, but you can add with Mission Other command)
• Mission Elevation Display.
  • You can now see the elevation profile and compare against the terrain based on the Google map data
• Rework of serial port handling.
  • New improvements in stability of serial port handling including bluetooth support.
• Update improvements
• Mission Editing performance issues (deleting 119 waypoints down from 10mins to 17secs)
• Graph View now show mode changes with text for bin/tlog/log file formats.
• Support for Ubuntu 14.04LTS (Trusty Tahir) builds (coming Monday, see preview here (It's identical except the version reports as 2.0.10)  (Trusty Tahir builds are now ready see here)

and many many more fixes... download here http://ardupilot.com/downloads/?category=35

Enjoy

The AP2 Team

PS: Users will be notified automatically if you have installed a previous build of AP2.

Bit of fun for those of you of a lyrical bent. We're working on an embroidered mission patch for our Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) project (first rough graphic above), and need a suitably stirring motto to go with it.

We've already got plenty of daft ideas from Register readers (and a few good ones too). If you fancy getting involved and perhaps winning one of the finished patches, there are details here. The deadline for submissions is Friday, so dust off your Latin dictionaries.

Last academic year at KU Leuven, we designed, built and test flown a VTOL UAV: the VertiKul. During this project we gratefully made use of the info and support of the DIY Drones community and therefore we would like to share our results on this project.

The VertiKul is designed for automated aerial transport of small packages and is optimized for maximum range and payload capability. The innovative design makes use of the benefits of both multi-rotors and fixed-wing airplanes. For take-off and landing, the VertiKul hovers like a quadrotor and for forward flight, the VertiKul pitches 90° and flies like an airplane.In airplane mode, the attitude is also controlled by differential thrust of the motors. Therefore, no additional control surfaces are required, reducing the number of moving parts, risk of failure and maintenance cost. The structure is made out of three carbon fiber tubes in a ‘H-configuration’ allowing an easy accessible space for a 10x15x20 cm package of 1kg. The tubes are connected using laser cut multiplex wood and wings are constructed using a polystyrene-balsa sandwich structure, covered with Oracover. For a good directional stability, the wings are slightly swept-back and winglets, that also help reducing the induced drag, are added. Since the wings introduce a high moment of inertia and strong moments because of wind around the yaw-axis, the propellers are tilted 10° to improve the yaw control.

Because of the two different flight modes and the transition in between, a new control strategy is needed. This strategy contains three levels. The first level, or low level, is the angular rate control as in “Acro mode”. Because of the -90° pitch in forward flight, it becomes hard for a human pilot to control the VertiKul since a roll command results in a yawing motion and a yaw command makes the vehicle roll (in counter-intuitive direction, yaw to the left results in roll to the right!). To make the control more intuitive, a mid-level controller is designed around the angular rate controller. This controller acts as “Stabilize mode” when the VertiKul is in hover and makes an automatic transition to forward flight when a switch is turned on the transmitter. The transition to forward flight takes around 5 seconds and gradually decreases the pitch angle to build up the speed required for enough lift of the wing in forward flight. Any input from the pilot is ignored during this phase.  A quaternion representation was required in order to avoid the ‘Gimbal lock’. In forward flight, the pilot inputs are only the desired altitude and heading, making it easy to fly by inexperienced pilots. Finally, the high-level controller generates a trajectory between two base stations and commands flight mode, altitude and heading to the mid-level controller.

In order to have a fully autonomous system, we also developed a docking system. The system includes an optical precision lading system, based on a PX4FLOW unit and a docking station at which a package or battery can be swapped. The VertiKul starts from one docking station with a fully charged battery and a package of 1 kg and then flies to its destination, 30km further, based on GPS. Once arrived at location, the VertiKul makes a precision landing on the docking station at that location. The battery is replaced with a full one and a new package is loaded so that the VertiKul can continue to its next destination.

The PX4FLOW camera we use for this autonomous precision landing is re-programmed in order to detect the center of the marker on the docking station and sends these coordinates to the autopilot on the VertiKul. Based on the altitude, roll and pitch angle of the VertiKul, the position of the marker is calculated and a position controller navigates the VertiKul to the landing spot. In order to be able to land at night, the marker is illuminated by leds under the surface of the translucent marker.

Check out the video here: http://youtu.be/omaxgFVDUWg

We haven’t yet been able to test the full performance of the VertiKul because of the limited test area where we can fly. During test flights we experienced a lot of influence of the wind on the big wings, making automatic landings very hard. Also the battery and package swap is not yet automated, leaving us with enough work to continue this project.

This is a short animation of the quality you should expect from about 220 images in nadir view over a 100x200 area. The texture is a single UV atlas of 8192 and at this size a little bit stretched when it comes to detail. Nevertheless, the mesh detail itself is very reasonably, showing humps and bumps of grass overgrowing the sides and areas with dead leaf and sand lining the trottoir bands. The mesh is already a little bit reduced to 1M polygons and it should be possible to go up to 3M without impacting too much the rendering times. 

It's clear that side shots are necessary to fill up the holes in the buildings and that it may even be necessary to remodel the simple structures in a 3D program altogether from a 3D approximation. Vegetation remains a problem. Together with the original photos it should be possible to come up with some stunning reproduction methods. I think in this case it's better to reduce the area a bit to maintain the texture detail.

From the NY Daily News:

They’re private eyes in the skies.

Investigators are taking drones to new heights — using the remote-controlled aircraft to catch New Yorkers cheating on spouses, lying about disabilities and endangering their kids.

“People want you to believe there’s all this negativity associated with drones . . . but they could be a very helpful tool,” said Olwyn Triggs, a gumshoe for 23 years and president of Professional Investigators Network Inc. in Glen Cove, LI.

Triggs recently used a drone to find an upstate man suspected of insurance fraud. Signs on his rural property warned that trespassers would be shot, so she sent in her 2-pound, foot-long Phantom 2 Vision quadcopter, which costs about $1,000.

“He was supposedly fully disabled,” she said. “We knew he was active but couldn’t prove it because of the layout of the property. I couldn’t risk being shot.”

So, as a drone hovered above, snapping images of the man chopping wood, Triggs manned the controls from behind a vehicle about 1,000 feet away.

“You need to think outside the box when someone’s acutely aware,” she said, adding the fraudster pretended to walk with a cane. “That’s when you’ll consider using a drone.”

Still, the legality of piloting drones is a gray area.

The Federal Aviation Administration deems it illegal to fly them for commercial use, including film and television.

But since a federal judge dismissed a $10,000 fine against a commercial drone user in March, many businesses are going ahead and flying them anyway.

“A lot of PIs bought drones [after the ruling],” Triggs said. “But before you use a drone, you’re calling everyone you know just to be sure.”

PIs are also using drones to catch cheating spouses.

Matthew Seifer recently pretended to test-fly a drone in Central Park. He was actually recording a husband fooling around with a female coworker from 100 feet away.

“Sometimes the best thing is to be right there in plain sight,” said Seifer, president of Long Island- based Executive Investigations.

“We had to get in and get out real quick,” he added. “We deployed a drone for eight minutes and got five minutes’ worth of video. That was the closure our client was looking for.”

Seifer operates several Phantom models, including the Phantom 2 Vision, and said drones are a “selling point” for clients.

Firms like his are charging double for their use — hiking the hourly rate from $47 to $97.

In another recent case, Seifer was having trouble tailing a fast-driving Long Island doctor suspected of hanky-panky. So the PI parked behind a steakhouse where the doc had taken a lover.

“We raised the drone above the restaurant, [and] he was engaged in a sexual act in the front seat of his car,” the investigator said.

“[Drones] get us those types of money shots.”

Drones have also been used in custody battles.

This year, Seifer’s team sent a drone to Sheepshead Bay to record a dad drinking and partying on a boat with his kids.

The PI snapped the boat’s serial number and images of the kids, who were not wearing life jackets, from more than 300 yards away.

Seifer’s footage has also busted criminals.

He recently helped a homeowner in another state file an insurance claim against tenants accused of running a dogfighting ring.

“We couldn’t get access to the back of the house through regular means,” Seifer said. “We utilized the drone to get evidentiary video of doghouses, chains and certain individuals.”

He turned over footage to authorities, and four people were arrested. The tenant lost his lease.

“Clients are amazed,” Seifer said. “The drones are a game changer.”

Hey all, I am normally more of a reader on here than a writer but I can see that we Have a Problem here with drone (hate that word) safety and reckless pilots.

I had an idea to create a website purely informational on drone safety, the do's and dont's. No spam, no blog posts, just the info that people need to know.

  - Don't fly over people

  - Don't fly over 400ft.

  - ......

  You get the idea.

Fact is there are too many people buying ready to fly quads that have no idea on the risks, or are just reckless pilots. Just look at some of the recent stories on here, the FAA ban on FPV........

In my opinion there is enough man power on here to build a website where people can go and check the general rules and Laws in there country and get flying responsibly.

We could get in contact with some of the big manufacturers and ask them to put a link on their purchase page to get the info where it needs to be.

This needs to be a group effort, we need to get the ball back in our court. I have built basic websites before but im not the best, at the moment it is just an idea.

Who's interested and how can you help?

So there it is, my idea. let see if we can get the ball rolling.

____Edit: 14.07.2014

Main Rules to be On webite:

1. Dont fly over Crowded or urban areas

2. Allways fly within visual line of sight (VLOS)

3. Dont Fly above 400ft. or 120Meters, normal air traffic starts at 500ft.

4. Dont fly near airports, flying withing 8km or 5 miles of an airport is extremely dangerous.

An impressive project from Hackaday:

The picture above looks like a standard four-wheel drive (4WD) touring car. As one looks closer, a few strange things start to pop out. Where’s the motor? 4 electronic speed controls? What’s going on here? [HammerFET] has created this independent drive R/C car (YouTube link) as a research platform for his control system. The car started off life as a standard Schumacher Mi5 1/10th scale Touring Car. [HammerFET] removed the entire drive system. The motor, differentials, belt drive, and ESC all made for quite a pile of discarded hardware.

He replaced the drive system with 4 Turnigy brushless outrunner motors, installed at the chassis center line. To fit everything together, he had to 3D print new drive cups from stainless steel. The Mi5′s CVD drive shafts had to be cut down, and new carbon fiber suspension towers had to be designed and cut.

The real magic lies in [HammerFET's] custom control board. He’s using an STM32F4 ARM processor and an InvenSense  MPU-6050 IMU which drone pilots have come to know and love. Hall effect sensors mounted above each motor keep track of the wheel speed, much like an ABS ring on a full-scale car.

[HammerFET's] software is created with MATLAB and SimuLink. He uses SimuLink’s embedded coder plugin to export his model to C, which runs directly on his board. Expensive software packages for sure, but they do make testing control algorithms much simpler. [HammerFET's] code is available on Github.

Since everything is controlled by software, changing the car’s drive system is as simple as tweaking a few values in the code. Front and rear power offset is easily changed. Going from a locked spool to an open differential is as simple as changing a value from 0 to 1. Pushing the differential value past 1 literally overdrives the differential. In a turn, the outer wheel will be driven faster than it would be on a mechanical differential, while the inner wheel is slowed down. Fans of drifting will love this setting!

[HammerFET] is still working on his software, he hopes to implement electronic torque vectoring. Interested? Check out the conversation over on his Reddit thread.

From Gizmag:

As any professional photographer knows, setting up lights can be a hassle. This is often the case in the studio, but especially when shooting on location. Before too long, however, it may be possible to use hovering autonomous drones as light sources. In fact, that's just what a team from MIT and Cornell University has already done. Their system not only does away with light stands, but the light-equipped aircraft automatically moves to compensate for movements of the model or photographer.

In a demo of the system, the researchers used a Parrot AR.Dronequadcopter to create rim lighting, an effect in which only one edge of the subject is strongly lit. The drone was equipped with a continuously-shining halogen light, a photographic flash, and a Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) unit. It was also communicating with an external computer.

The photographer's camera, meanwhile, was linked to that same computer, sending signals to it 20 times a second. A program analyzed the images, and monitored the width of the brightly-lit area along the edge of the subject.

To start, the photographer indicated the direction from which they wanted the light to come. The copter responded by proceeding to that side of the subject. The photographer then indicated how wide they wished the brightly lit rim to be, as a percentage of the total lit area of the subject. This caused the copter to adjust its position, in order to create that effect.

When the subject or photographer moved, however, it would cause that width (and thus percentage) to change. Using an algorithm that was constantly assessing the image from the camera, the drone was able to compensate for those movements, restoring the lit area to its desired width.

Rim lighting is particularly tricky, so producing more conventional lighting should presumably be easier. Likewise, for stationary subjects, the ability to compensate for movements won't be a crucial feature.

The system was developed by Manohar Srikanth when he was an MIT grad student, along with MIT's Prof. Frédo Durand and Cornell's Kavita Bala. It will be presented in August, at the International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging.

Source: MIT

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Over the past several days and seemly there is no coincidence that almost immediately after the news of the FAA recent announcement we have what I thought was a perfect example of someone who was very new to the new machine that he was using or was blatantly reckless. I probably like many thought 'This is all we need is people doing stupid things that will make it harder on all of us' . Then I cam across a story about the same subject however it had more than just a reporters commentary, but the recording of the NYPD Helicopter Pilot and the Air Traffic Controller. It is hard to change what was said on recording.

The Story that I found the recording : http://motherboard.vice.com/read/police-recording-confirms-nypd-flew-at-a-drone-never-feared-crash

Here's a full transcript of the recording:

NYPD—What kind of contact do you have … at this time.

Tower—What do you mean, what kind of contact?

NYPD—I don’t know. We just had an aircraft do vertical climbs pretty fast.

Tower—I don’t see anything on the radar. About how high would you say it went?

NYPD—I'd say 0 to about 2,000 [feet] in less than two seconds. And he's got green and red now. He's going up Spuyten Duyval [bridge], northbound at this time.

Tower—Really? I don’t see anything on the radar. Im not seeing anything like that.

NYPD—He has to be military. He's moving. He's right over top of us right now, LaGuardia. He did a 180 really quick. Going down the east river at this time. I just want to make sure its not a drone.

Tower—I’ll look out the window.

NYPD—LaGuardia we are 800 feet and he is level with us at this time.

Tower—He's level.

NYPD—Going Spuyten Duyval to the [George Washington Bridge]. He's got to be a drone.

Tower—Roger that.

NYPD—He's got red and green lights. Hes trucking, hes moving fast. LaGuardia, definitely a drone. Hes going up the streets now between buildings.

Tower—Ok, all right. Man, theres really gotta be a better way to maybe disable these guys.

NYPD—We are going to stay here and figure out where he puts it.

Tower—Take your time, you’re the only ones in the air.

NYPD—Will do. Yeah, we got drone activity at the GW Bridge. We are trying to walk an RMP [remote mobile patrol] into it. We got the guys operating it on the ground. Hopefully we can get these guys collared up.

Tower—In the vicinity of the GW? They were at the GW. Now I got three, four, coming up to Fairview and 193, vicinity of.

Tower—All right, you want me to do anything from here.

NYPD—Nope, just letting you know.

NYPD—Ok we got these guys are saying these are just toys but these drones were flying in vicinity of [George Washington Bridge]. They buzz around us as well.

Tower—All right what altitude were you guys at.

NYPD—These things were well over 2,000 feet. They were above us at 1,000.

Tower—You still have a visual.

NYPD—No, we've got custody, we've locked the [radio mobile patrol police cars] into them. You know, we have the guys who were operating them. We really don’t know exactly what we have, maybe a reckless. Not sure what exactly we got.

Tower—All right 10-4.

NYPD—Just so you know there was a class given to lt perez, I don’t know if you want to disturb him or not, but he had all the info on that.

Tower—All right 10-4 thank you.

NYPD—Tiny little, we got them on the ground now. Tiny little drones with four blades on it. But, yeah, It was all the way over the GW. Now we are all the way over at Spuyten Duyval flying two miles away to 2,000 feet.

NYPD—They are with them right now, but we don’t even know what we have.

NYPD—Definitely, we just don’t know what kind of crime we have right now.

NYPD—Seems to me, if they were at 1,000 feet, they'd have to be operating that thing recklessly, regardless of whether or not it was a toy.